Emily Balcetis’ transformative research program focuses on a theoretical model of motivated visual perception. Her work demonstrates that a person’s goals and desires influence what they literally see and hear in the environment around them, through changes in visual and cognitive attention. By incorporating visual perception into motivated cognition, she advances comprehensive psychological models of how people regulate their behavior. Balcetis’s research on motivated perception provides new insights into self-regulation, goal pursuit, and complex social cognition. It has fundamentally shifted the way researchers think about interactions between higher-order mental states and lower-level perceptual processes.
Moreover, her work has important applications, some already documented for understanding how to combat deleterious social problems, including obesity, bias in jury decision-making, racial bias in voting, and relationship dissatisfaction.
Dr. Balcetis has 57 publications, including 28 peer-reviewed journal articles, 11 book chapters, and 3 edited volumes. As of October 2015, Google Scholar lists 1349 citations of her work and notes an h-index of 15. Balcetis’s seminal paper on motivated perception (Balcetis & Dunning, 2006)—work for which she won the SESP Dissertation Award in 2007—has been cited 435 times, averaging over 48 citations a year since publication, which is 10 times higher than the impact factor of the preeminent journal it is published in (JPSP).
Balcetis’s outstanding work has received substantial support (over $1.07 million) from both internal and external grant funding agencies. In a sparse funding climate, Balcetis has three concurrent National Science Foundation grants, totaling over $989,000, supporting her work on motivated perception and attention.
Balcetis’ work has received significant attention outside of academia. She worked with National Geographic to produce and appear in a television program on the motivations behind altruism. Forbes, Huffington Post, Atlantic Magazine, Newsweek, Pacific Standard, Politico, Time Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health Magazine, and numerous NPR programs have covered her research. Emily’s reputation as the preeminent expert in motivated perception has led her to be invited to speak at multiple high impact public events including TEDx.
Balcetis is an innovative and inspiring researcher. She is an exceptionally engaging writer, a critical and creative thinker, a clever experimentalist, and a tenacious and prolific scientist.
Dr. Balcetis is associate professor of psychology in the Department of Psychology at New York University. She earned her doctorate in social psychology from Cornell University in 2006.
