(Final Test : Research of Education)

Lecturer : Dr Dwi Anggani LB

Des, 25. 2012

 

a.       Title           : The Development of Expressive Drawing Abilities during Childhood and into

  Adolescence.

b.      Reseacher  : Delphine

c.       Abstract    : 

The way children portray emotions in their drawings of human and nonhuman topics is assumed to reflect their artistic, emotional, and cognitive development. This study was designed to investigate the development of expressive drawings during childhood and into adolescence, using a large age range (5–15 years) and sample size

(N=480), so as to provide a precise and comprehensive view of age-related changes in children’s ability to produce expressive drawings. More specifically, we focused on children’s developing ability to use the techniques of literal and metaphorical expression, either alone or in combination. We also examined the effects of sex, topics (house, tree, or person), and the depicted emotion (happiness or sadness) on the use of each expressive technique. The main findings were that there is a developmental shift /move, change/ between childhood (5–10 years) and adolescence (11–15 years) in the use of expressive techniques, from simple (literal) to more complex forms of expression (metaphorical).

1. Introduction

People have studied about drawing  from many different perspectives (e.g., changes in conceptual knowledge, motor skills, aspects of cognitive development, emotional states, or personality traits). They observed of children’s psychological functioning (i.e., perceptual, motor, cognitive, emotional). They analyzed the representational aspects of drawings, particularly the degree of visual realism with which children depict reality. as Ives’ statement that a drawing is much more than what it represents (page 152). Drawings can express psychological moods and basic emotions.  It can be literal (directdrawing expression) or metaphorical (indirectdrawing expression).

Surprisingly, previous studies neglected experimental investigation. And, in our study, we examined the development of children’s and adolescents’ ability to produce expressive drawings of human and nonhuman topics, as shown by their use of literal and/or metaphorical expression. Some differences between our study and the previous ones. First, our study is  was designed primarily to provide a more precise and comprehensive picture of children’s ability to produce expressive drawings. Second, methodologically, the availability of materials. Finally, the analysis of drawings.

Our main hypotheses were (i) between childhood and adolescence, there would be a shift away from the use of literal expression toward the use of more complex forms of expressions - with regard to age-related trends, (ii) if the sex-related effects observed in young adolescents  can be generalized to a wider developmental period, the girls in our study would display a greater ability to combine literal and metaphorical expressions and a lesser inclination to use literal expression alone than the boys, regardless of age.

2. Method

2.1. Participants

A total of 480 children and adolescents took part in the study. They were recruited from state schools in middle-class districts of southern French cities. None of them were known to suffer from a mood disorder, a psychomotor drawing, or handwriting disorder.

2.2. Materials

The materials consisted of white sheets of paper, a standard writing pencil, and nine crayons (black, brown, green, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and pink).

2.3. Procedure

A set of procedure in drawing.

3. Results

3.1. Developmental Curves of Expressive Drawing Abilities

First, only a minority of the children (no more than 10% of the youngest children) failed to meet the requirements to draw expressively. Second, the dominant expressive technique used by the young children was literal expression. Third,  children displayed an increasing ability to combine literal and metaphorical expressions in their drawings as they grew older. Fourth and finally, both children and young adolescents displayed a limited use of metaphorical expression.

3.2. Sex-Related Differences

The ANOVAs yielded significant main effects of sex on the frequency of literal expression.

 This pattern of results fits in with Hypothesis 2.

3.3. Topic Effects

Main effects of topic were found on the frequency of literal expression, with a medium effect size, literal and metaphorical expression, with a small effect size, and metaphorical expression, with a large effect size, significant differences in the occurrence of each expressive technique (literal, metaphorical, literal and metaphorical) between drawings of nonhuman topics and drawings of people, with no significant differences between drawings of houses and trees.

3.4. Emotion Effects

Literal expression was used more often in happy drawings than in sad ones, as revealed by a significant main effect of emotion on the frequency of use of literal expression.By contrast, sadness elicited metaphorical expression more often than happiness did, as revealed by a significant main effect of emotion on the frequency of use of this technique, with a small effect size.Again, it should be noted that the emotion effect observed for metaphorical expression was concerned only with the expressive drawings of the nonhuman topics.

4. Discussion

This study was intended to provide an overview of the development of expressive drawing abilities from childhood to early adolescence. As expected (Hypothesis 1), we found clear age-related changes in the types of techniques used by children to draw expressively, with entry into adolescence being a pivotal period. As expected (Hypothesis 2), we found sex-related differences in the use of expressive techniques. Extending previous results [16], our study revealed that, during both childhood and early adolescence, girls demonstrate a greater ability to combine literal and metaphorical expression in their drawings and a lesser inclination to use literal expression alone than boys. Interestingly, these sex-related effects did not interact with age, suggesting that there are some stable characteristics that differentiate expressive drawings produced by boys from those produced by girls.

To conclude, the present study produced descriptive accounts of the normal developmental curves of expressive drawing abilities during childhood and early adolescence. It additionally highlighted differences in the use of literal and metaphorical expression according to the participants’ sex, the type of topic to be illustrated, and the valence of the emotion being expressed in the drawing. Taken together, these findings add to our understanding of expressive drawing development and the factors that affect children’s and young adolescents’ ability to draw expressively. They also provide useful baseline data for future comparative studies in developmental psychopathol