Dr Devin Terhune joined the Department of Psychology at King's in 2022 as a Reader (Associate Professor). He completed his BA in Philosophy and Psychology at Concordia University (Canada), MSc in Psychology (with distinction) at the University of Liverpool, and PhD in Psychology at Lund University (Sweden). After completing his PhD, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. More recently, before joining King's, he lectured in statistics and coding in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Dr Terhune's research in the Awareness & Modulation Lab falls at the interface between experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive neuropsychiatry. He is primarily interested in how various features of awareness and perception can be altered including hallucinations. This had led to a deep interest in how verbal suggestions can be used to modulate awareness such as in the contexts of hypnosis, placebo, and nocebo. Much of the Lab’s research aims to characterise the neurocognitive profile of individuals who are highly responsive to verbal suggestions.

Alongside this strand of work, Dr Terhune pursues research on altered awareness in dissociative states (e.g., depersonalisation/derealisation) and dissociative disorders and functional neurological disorder (e.g., non-epileptic seizures). His lab conducts research on dissociation by studying patient populations characterised by dissociative symptomatology and by experimentally inducing dissociative states in the laboratory using nitrous oxide.

Another of Dr Terhune's research interests is time perception, including the factors that contribute to transient fluctuations and distortions in our experience of time. A considerable amount of his lab’s research is concerned with intra-individual variability and inter-individual heterogeneity in time perception.

The Awareness & Modulation Lab studies these different phenomena using psychophysical tasks, self-report methods, EEG, nitrous oxide (and other psychedelics), latent variable modelling and a range of statistical approaches. In the past, Dr Terhune has also used non-invasive brain stimulation, eye-tracking, and other methods.

Research interests

• Consciousness
• Dissociative states and disorders
• Functional neurological disorder
• Hallucinations
• Hypnosis
• Metacognition
• Placebo/nocebo responses
• Psychedelics
• Suggestion and suggestibility
• Time perception

Please email Devin if you are interested in joining the Awareness & Modulation Lab as a postdoc, PhD student, BSc/MSc student, or research intern to work on any of the above topics.

Teaching

Dr Terhune (co-)leads the modules ‘Distorted worlds: Variability in memory and perception’ and ‘Psychology of Suggestion: Placebo effects and beyond’ on the BSc Psychology programme, for which he also supervises Year 3 dissertation projects. He is also the PhD admissions tutor for the Department of Psychology.

Expertise and public engagement

Dr Terhune is an Associate Editor for Consciousness and Cognition, a Council Member of the Hypnosis & Psychosomatic Medicine Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He was the recipient of the 2020 Masters Teacher of the Year Award (UK Postgraduate Awards) and co-recipient of the 2024 Supervisory Excellence Award for the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (King’s Doctoral College).

He regularly communicates his research to media outlets and has acted as a consultant for a range of media, science, and art projects pertaining to his areas of expertise.