Matthias Gamer

I am Professor of Experimental Clinical Psychology at the University of Würzburg. My research is situated at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and clinical psychology, with a particular focus on social and emotional processes. Our work investigates social attention and gaze behaviour, fear learning and generalization, approach–avoidance processes, and the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social connectedness. A second line of research, which originated in my diploma thesis, focuses on developing and evaluating psychophysiological methods for detecting deception and concealed information. Methodologically, we adopt a multimodal approach that combines behavioural experiments, eye tracking, psychophysiology, EEG, and functional neuroimaging. In addition to conventional laboratory experiments, we conduct studies in virtual reality and real-world settings. Although most of our studies involve healthy participants, we also conduct clinical research in patients with psychiatric disorders, including social anxiety, autism spectrum, and borderline personality disorders.

I studied psychology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and received my doctorate there in 2008 with work on how the visual system integrates depth cues. I then moved to the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, where I led a research group on social and applied psychophysiology. After receiving an ERC Starting Grant for the project “Mechanisms of Social Attention” (MESA), I moved to the University of Würzburg in 2015.