Effects of different emotion terms on the size and colour of children's drawings

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that, when an affective characterisation is given to a topic, children adjust the size and colour of those topics in their drawings: children increase the size of drawings of topics characterised as “nice”, do not always decrease the size of topics characterised as “nasty”, and use differential colouring systematically to distinguish between “nice” and “nasty” topics in their drawings (Burkitt et al., 2003a, b, 2004). The present experiment was designed to examine whether these specific effects only occur with the terms “nice” and “nasty”, or whether they also occur with another pair of positive and negative terms, “happy” and “sad”. One hundred and two 4–7 year olds were divided into two groups and asked to draw either a baseline, “nice” and “nasty” man, or a baseline, “happy” and “sad” man. It was found that the valence of the characterisation (positive vs. negative), as well as the specific pair of words which was used, systematically influenced both the size and the colour of the children's drawings. These results show the importance of understanding the exact emotions in question when interpreting children's drawings on the basis of size and colour.

Keywords:

• Children
• emotion
• drawing
• interpretation
• colour
• size

Acknowledgements

The research team would like to thank all of the children and teachers who participated in this project.