Dr Rory T. Devine Ph.D., C.Psychol., AFBPsS.

Dr Rory T. Devine

School of Psychology
Associate Professor

Contact details

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 3340
Email
r.t.devine@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@devine_mr_rory
View my research portal
Address
School of Psychology
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Dr Rory T. Devine is a developmental psychologist with expertise in children’s social and cognitive development, longitudinal research methods and psychometrics. His research focuses on individual differences in ‘higher-order’ cognitive skills from infancy to adulthood. His work seeks to understand: (1) why children differ from one another in their ability to reason about others’ minds (or ‘theory of mind’) and to control their own thoughts and actions (or ‘executive function’); and (2) what consequences variation in these domains has for social, behavioural and academic adjustment.

Qualifications

  • BSc (Hons) (University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland)
  • MPhil (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)
  • PhD (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)

Teaching

  • Introduction to Developmental Psychology

Postgraduate supervision

Dr Devine is interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:
Cognitive Development, Social Development, Theory of Mind, Executive Function, Psychopathology, School Readiness, Parenting and Families, Peer Relationships, Longitudinal Methods, Individual Differences. Dr Devine's research uses advanced quantitative methods including confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, multi-level modelling and path analysis. He does not supervise projects using qualitative methods. Please email Dr Devine before making an application to discuss potential projects.

Research

Dr Rory T. Devine is a developmental psychologist with expertise in children’s social and cognitive development, longitudinal research methods and psychometrics. His research focuses on individual differences in social and cognitive skills from infancy to adulthood. His work seeks to understand: (1) why children differ from one another in their ability to reason about others’ minds (or ‘theory of mind’) and to control their own thoughts and actions (or ‘executive function’); and (2) what consequences variation in these domains has for social, behavioural and academic adjustment and well-being. Dr Devine is also interested in how children's social experiences at home (e.g., with parents, carers and siblings) and at school (e.g., with teachers and peers) impact on children's social and cognitive development. 

Other activities

Dr Devine is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He is also a member of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Foley, S, Devine, RT & Hughes, C 2023, 'Mind-mindedness in new mothers and fathers: stability and discontinuity from pregnancy to toddlerhood', Developmental Psychology, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 128–140. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001468

Devine, RT, Kovatchev, V, Grumley Traynor, I, Smith, P & Lee, M 2022, 'Machine learning and deep learning systems for automated measurement of ‘advanced’ theory of mind: reliability and validity in children and adolescents', Psychological Assessment.

NewFAMS Investigators 2022, 'Mothers’ and fathers’ executive function both predict emergent executive function in toddlerhood', Developmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13263

Catling, J, Michail, M, Lakhani , N & Devine, RT 2022, 'Psychological and lifestyle predictors of mental health in higher education: how healthy are our students?', Journal of Mental Health, Training, Education and Practice, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 562-571. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMHTEP-08-2021-0092

van der Kleij, SW, Apperly, I, Shapiro, LR, Ricketts, J & Devine, RT 2022, 'Reading fiction and reading minds in early adolescence: A longitudinal study', Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 222, 105476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105476

Li, W, Devine, RT, Ribner, A, Emmen, RAG, Woudstra, M-LJ, Branger, MCE, Wang, L, van Ginkel, J, Alink, LRA & Mesman, J 2022, 'The role of infant attention and parental sensitivity in infant cognitive development in the Netherlands and China', Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 215, 105324. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105324

Fujita, N, Devine, R & Hughes, C 2022, 'Theory of mind and executive function in early childhood: a cross cultural investigation', Cognitive Development, vol. 61, 101150. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2021.101150

IMAGINE-ID Consortium 2021, 'Childhood intellectual disability and parents' mental health: integrating social, psychological and genetic influences', British Journal of Psychiatry , vol. 218, no. 6, pp. 315-322. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2020.38

Lecce, S, Ronchi, L & Devine, RT 2021, 'Mind what teacher says: teachers' propensity for mental-state language and children's theory of mind in middle childhood', Social Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12552

Chapter

Devine, RT 2021, Individual differences in theory of mind in middle childhood and adolescence. in RT Devine & S Lecce (eds), Theory of Mind in Middle Childhood and Adolescence: Integrating Multiple Perspectives. 1st edn, Routledge, pp. 55-76. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429326899-5

Conference contribution

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M & Devine, R 2021, Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children's mindreading ability. in C Zong, F Xia, W Li & R Navigli (eds), Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). vol. 1, International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP), Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, pp. 1196-1206, Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, ACL-IJCNLP 2021, Virtual, Online, 1/08/21. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.96

Other contribution

Hughes, C, Devine, RT, Fink, E, D'Souza, H, Dempsey, C, Heng, J, Gray, L & Jess, M 2021, Connecting viewpoints on school readiness and child wellbeing. Center for Open Science. https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/ngdfx

Preprint

IMAGINE-ID Consortium 2022 'Intellectual disability and parents’ mental health within the IMAGINE cohort study – how and when does genetic diagnosis matter?' PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/h67uz

Kovatchev, V, Smith, P, Lee, M & Devine, R 2021 'Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children's mindreading ability' arXiv. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01635v1>

Review article

Todorov, J, Devine, RT & De Brito, S 2023, 'Association between childhood maltreatment and callous-unemotional traits in youth: a meta-analysis', Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105049

View all publications in research portal