User:Ivi64/Mateusz Gola

Mateusz Gola – scientist and psychotherapist, full professor of psychology at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and full research professor at the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California in San Diego, specializing in research on behavioral addictions (e.g. pornography, sexual behavior, computer games, or gambling) and substance addictions.

Scientific biography
Mateusz Gola obtained his master's degree in 2008 in clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the Faculty of Psychology of SWPS University. In 2011, he completed individual doctoral studies at the same faculty based on the thesis entitled Electrophysiological Indicators of Reduced Attention Skills in the Aging Process (supervised by Prof. Andrzej Wróbel). During his doctoral studies, he twice won the Start scholarship awarded by the Foundation for Polish Science and also started working as a lecturer at SWPS University, initially as an assistant (until 2011) and then as an assistant professor (until 2014), where he was involved in creating cognitive neuroscience program. Since 2014, Mateusz Gola has been affiliated with the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Also, in 2014, he devoted himself to research and clinical work on behavioral addictions and compulsive sexual behaviors. In 2014–2016 he was a visiting professor at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and in 2017, he completed a research internship at the School of Medicine at Yale University. Also, in 2017, he obtained in Poland his habilitation in psychology based on a series of pioneering scientific publications on mechanisms of compulsive sexual behavior. In 2023, the president of the Republic of Poland granted him the title of full professor of social sciences in the discipline of psychology. The same year he was also promoted to the full research professor position at the Institute of Computational Neuroscience at the University of California San Diego. His research contributed to the recognition of compulsive sexual behavior as a disorder and its inclusion by the World Health Organization in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

Psychotherapeutic work
In 2013, Prof. Gola obtained a clinical license from the Polish Society for Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Between 2009 and 2014, he worked as a psychotherapist at the Ogrody Zmian, of which he was a co-founder. Since 2014 he has had a private online practice focused mainly on mood and anxiety disorders and addictions, especially compulsive sexual behavior, which became a direct inspiration for his further scientific work. Since 2018, he has been working with patients from all over the world via the Internet.

Most important achievements
One of the most important scientific achievements of Mateusz Gola is his systematic research of the psychological and neural mechanisms and treatment of compulsive sexual behavior (e.g. addictive use of pornography or compulsive engagement in paid or casual sex) published in leading international scientific journals, i.e. “World Psychiatry”, "Lancet Psychiatry", "Nature Neuropsychopharmacology", "Journal of Behavioral Addiction", and "Journal of Sexual Medicine". Until 2024, Mateusz Gola authored or co-authored over 120 scientific papers on the subject of compulsive sexual behavior. This work contributed to the World Health Organization's inclusion of compulsive sexual behavior in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

Results of studies conducted by Prof. Mateusz Gola were featured in multiple media coverage including BBC's documentary Planet Sex with Cara Delevingene (in the USA available at Hulu), Newsweek, and plenty of YouTube videos with multiple millions of views.

Prof. Gola received s several distinctions and scholarships, e.g. Scholarship of the Society for Psychophysiological Researcha, Scholarship of the Minister of National Education and Higher Educati of Polandon, and Scholarship of The Kosciuszko Foundation.