Amy Paine

Research Associate

: paineal@cardiff.ac.uk

Research summary

Primary research interests: Child development, family relationships, theory of mind, language and executive function.

In my PhD I studied family influences on the development of children’s understanding of minds. In my research I explored the influence of sibling constellation factors on 6- to 7-year-olds’ understanding of minds, and the processes by which such sibling influences may occur.

I am currently investigating children’s early language development and parent-child interaction within the context of the Baby and Adult Building Blocks Language Evaluation (BABBLE) study; a sub-study of the Building Blocks randomised control trial investigating the effectiveness of the Family Nurse Partnership programme in the United Kingdom. I am also working on the Cardiff Child Development Study investigating early peer interactions, mother-child interaction and sociocognitive development.

Teaching summary

2017 - Present: Visiting speaker on the South Wales Doctoral Programme in Clinical Psychology.

2016 – 2017: Lead Graduate Teaching Assistant

2013 – 2016: Graduate Teaching Assistant for Level 4 and 5 modules (Introduction to Psychology, Current Topics in Psychological Research, Social Psychology I, Biological Psychology and Language and Memory).

Undergraduate education

2013: BSc Psychology with Professional Placement, Cardiff University

Postgraduate education

2017: PhD Developmental and Health Psychology, Cardiff University

Employment

2017 – Present: Research Associate, School of Psychology, Cardiff University.

2016: Research Assistant, South East Wales Trials Unit, School of Medicine, Cardiff University.

2012: CUROP Research Assistant, School of Psychology, Cardiff University.

2011 – 2012: Research Assistant, Institute of Psychiatry.

2018

Paine, A. L.et al. 2018. Late, but not early, arriving younger siblings foster firstborns' understanding of second-order false belief. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 166, pp. 251-265. (10.1016/j.jecp.2017.08.007)

2017

Paine, A. 2017. Explaining the influence of younger siblings on firstborns’ understanding of minds in middle childhood: a longitudinal investigation of the mother- firstborn relationship. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.

Research topics and related papers

My research focuses on the influence of sibling relationships on children’s social and emotional development. I am interested in the impact that an arrival of a sibling has on first-born behaviour, as well as variations in dyadic sibling relationships and sibling differential experiences. The aim of my research is to investigate how these factors contribute to sibling resemblence and individual differences in children’s prosocial and antisocial behaviour, psychopathology and interpersonal relationship quality across the family system.