Dr. Rotem Berkovich was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project, “A Psychophysical Approach to Emotional Experience: Scaling Emotional Experiences with Stevens’ Power Law”. Her research lies at the intersection of affective science and psychophysics and advances emotion psychophysics as a quantitative approach to studying emotional experience. Specifically, she investigates how the intensity of emotional stimuli is transformed into the intensity of felt experience and seeks to identify the psychophysical laws that govern this process.

Rotem earned her B.A. in psychology and philosophy, M.A. in experimental psychology and data science, and Ph.D. in psychology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, under the supervision of Professor Nachshon Meiran. Her doctoral research examined emotional experience as a perceptual process and developed a model-based ratio-scale measure of emotional intensity. Her findings showed that both pleasant and unpleasant emotional feelings follow Weber’s law, a fundamental principle of perception.

Rotem’s work has been recognized with several honors, including the Fellowship for Outstanding Women Postdoctoral Researchers Abroad from the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel, the Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellowship at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and the Rector’s Honors Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Research.

Recent publications:

• Berkovich, R., & Meiran, N. (in press). Emotional valence experiences, not sensory valence: Clarifying James’s theory of emotion: Reply to Roelofs (2026). Emotion.
• Berkovich, R., & Reggev, N. (2026). Registered report stage I: Is it unpleasant to predict kindergarten teacher = man? Testing the emotional response to the anticipation of confirmation or violation of gendered stereotypes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 123, 104854. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104854
• Berkovich, R., & Meiran, N. (2023). Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (Weber’s Law) as most sensations do. Emotion, 23(5), 1213–1223. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001161. Selected as APA Editor’s Choice Article.