The roles of emotional comprehension 1

The roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children’s

expressive drawing

Keywords: Emotion Comprehension Children Drawing Expressive Representation The roles of emotional comprehension 2

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children’s expressive drawing. Fifty 7- to 10-year-olds were asked to produce two (happy and sad) expressive drawings, two representational drawings

(drawing of a man running and drawing of a house) and to answer the Test of Emotion

Comprehension (Pons & Harris, 2000). The expressive drawings were assessed on the number of expressive subject matter themes (‘content expression’) and the overall quality of expression on a 5-point scale. Each of the representational drawings was measured on a scale assessing detail and visual realism criteria, and contributed to a single representational drawing skill score.

In line with our predictions, we found that both emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill accounted for a significant variance in children’s expressive drawings. We explain that children’s developing emotional comprehension may allow them to consider more detailed and poignant expressive ideas for their drawings, and that their developing representational drawing skill facilitates the graphic execution of these emotional ideas.

Keywords: Emotion Comprehension Children Drawing Expressive Representation The roles of emotional comprehension 3

The roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children’s

expressive drawing

The activity of drawing allows children to not only depict subject matter from their knowledge of the external world, but is a tool through which children can express their moods, feelings and ideas visually from their inner world (Burkitt, Watling, & Murray, 2011; Gombrich,

1972; Jolley, 2010). Subject matter can be depicted in varying levels of realism depending upon the use of (for example) detail, proportion, positioning and spatial arrangement, depth and perspective cues (Cox, 2005; Jolley, 2010). Where an emotional/conceptual perspective is communicated it is called an expressive drawing, in which any of three broad pictorial techniques are presented: literal, content and abstract expression (Burkitt, Barrett, & Davis,

2003; Ives, 1984; Jolley, 2010; Jolley, Fenn, & Jones, 2004; Morra, Caloni, & d’Amico, 1994;

Picard, Brechet, & Baldy, 2007). Literal expression is typically depicted by facial (happy, sad, etc.) expressions. Content expression uses subject matter for expressive effect, such as a cloud- ridden sky pouring rain over a barren landscape evoking a depressing mood. Abstract expression refers to a range of formal properties such as colour, line and composition. For instance, a picture showing bright colours, uplifting lines and a balanced composition is likely to express a positive ambience. An expressive drawing may use all three techniques in combination, and therefore may be deemed both representational and expressive.

Drawing expressively is particularly important for children as it allows them to develop an emotional/conceptual perspective that goes beyond the literal meanings of the subject matter represented. Furthermore, expression is considered an important aesthetic property in works of art (see Goodman, 1968), and therefore drawing expressively allows children to develop an important artistic skill. In respect of the developmental progression of children’s expressive The roles of emotional comprehension 4 drawing both a U-shaped pattern and an age-incremental pattern have been reported (Davis,

1997; Gardner & Winner, 1982; Jolley, 2010; Jolley, Fenn & Jones, 2004; Picard & Gauthier,

2012; Pariser & van den Berg, 1997, 2001). However, in contrast to the attention given to developmental patterns in expressive drawing little is known about which skills influence individual differences in performance. This is despite consistent evidence throughout the literature of variation of scores around central tendency measures on expressive drawing tasks, as well as variability between children in their use of the three expressive techniques (e.g., Ives,

1984; Picard et al., 2007; Picard & Gauthier, 2012; Winston, Kenyon, Stewardson, & Lepine,

1995).

The small body of work investigating relevant skills in children's expressive drawing has reported positive associations between expressive drawing performance and visual metaphor comprehension (Winston et al., 1995), divergent thinking (Picard & Boulhais, 2011), working memory (Morra et al., 1994) and representational drawing skill (Jolley, Cox, & Barlow, 2003;

Jolley et al., 2004; Picard et al., 2007). Nevertheless, the associations between these skills and expressive drawing were somewhat mixed and inconsistent (see also Jolley, 2010). For instance, significant correlations between visual metaphor comprehension and expressive drawing were reported for relatively few content themes and formal properties displayed in children’s drawings of happy and sad trees (Winston et al. 1995). Jolley (2010) suggested that diverging thinking may play a more central role than sensitivity to visual metaphors in generating expressive ideas for drawing. Recently, Picard and Boulhais (2011) found significant relationships for three of the four figural creativity scores of a diverging thinking test and expressive drawing scores based on children's use of literal, content and abstract strategies in their tree and house drawings. In respect of the role of working memory in expressive drawing, Morra et al. (1994) found that The roles of emotional comprehension 5 working memory was involved in children's (tree and ship) drawings of metaphorical expression but not the literal representations of emotion (person). Finally, although positive associations have consistently been reported between representational and expressive drawing skill, not all have been significant. In summary, while some significant links between these individual differences and expressive drawing have been reported, these have not been consistent for all expressive drawing techniques and topics drawn.

Furthermore, this research has neglected the potential role of children's emotional comprehension in their expressive drawing performance (but see Brechet, Baldy, & Picard,

2009), a relationship in which a close connection might be expected because of the common aspects shared by these two abilities. Despite the current “lack of clear consensus as regards a working definition of emotional skills” (Wigelsworth, Humphrey, Kalambouka, & Lendrum,

2010, p. 177), it seems that emotional comprehension can be reliably defined as the understanding of the nature, causes and consequences of emotions for ourselves and other people

(Harris, 2008; Lafortune, Daniel, Doudin, Pons, & Albanese, 2006; Pons, de Rosnay, & Doudin,

2010). In the same way, the ability to draw expressively requires knowing the specific emotion that is to be depicted, imagining an appropriate context for that emotion, and depicting it so that an audience can interpret the intended message (Burkitt et al., 2011; Jolley, 2010; Brechet et al.,

2009).

The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons & Harris, 2000) is a widely used test which was developed to measure developmental and individual differences in children’s emotional comprehension, and was informed by a substantial body of research (Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004). The TEC has been used to examine the link between emotion understanding and various aspects of children’s development and abilities, such as musical training The roles of emotional comprehension 6

(Schellenberg & Mankarious, 2012), working memory (Morra, Parrella, & Camba, 2011), attachment (Baron & Lionetti, 2012), and non-verbal intelligence (Albanese, De Stasio, Di

Chiacchio, Fiorilli, & Pons, 2010). The TEC assesses emotion understanding by presenting vignettes in which a character experiences simple to complex situations eliciting different emotional states. Children’s responses to the test are non-verbal: children are asked to point to the appropriate expressive face to select the emotion felt by the character. In this test, the complexity of emotional comprehension is assessed among nine series of items with increasing complexity. Pons and Harris reported that children’s emotional comprehension (as measured by the TEC) increased developmentally between 3 and 11, with noticeable individual differences

(Farina, Albanese, & Pons, 2007; Pons & Harris, 2005; Pons et al., 2004). More precisely, children around 5 can understand very simple and public aspects of emotion (i.e., basic situational causes and outward expression); children around 7 have a more elaborate emotional comprehension by understanding more complex situational causes to emotion, including those that take into account another person’s desires and beliefs; and children around 10 have a highly- developed emotional comprehension by understanding that a person can think about a particular emotionally charged event from more than one perspective, including the consideration of morality.

To sum up, research using the TEC has shown that children develop a deeper understanding of emotion by considering various aspects of situational, causal or social knowledge, as well as their knowledge of emotions per se, and by integrating these different sorts of information (see also, Morra et al., 2011). Moreover, like drawing tasks, the TEC is sensitive to individual differences and requires non-verbal responses, contrary to numerous tasks of emotion comprehension in which children are often asked to label emotions or to tell The roles of emotional comprehension 7 emotional stories (e.g., Brechet et al., 2009; Russell & Widen, 2002; Widen & Russell, 2003).

Because of all these distinctive features, we chose to use the TEC to measure children’s emotional comprehension in the present study.

We predicted that children's emotional comprehension development would impact their expressive drawing in two specific ways. First, it is likely that a developing and more abstract understanding of the causes and influences on emotion, as reflected in the increasing complexity of the TEC’s items, would broaden the range of expressive subject matter due to the depiction of more complex scenes and narratives of emotion. In tasks that specifically request (happy and sad) expressive drawings, with no restriction on content1, research by Jolley and colleagues

(Jolley, 2010; Jolley et al., 2003, 2004) has found a developmental shift where children aged up to 9 years of age typically produce drawings using literal depictions only (i.e. person[s] with an expressive face), whereas children beyond 9 years use a wider range of content themes (e.g., social events, countryside, weather, vehicles, buildings, animals, text/speech, etc.) that they employ in narrative scenes that evoke or explain a mood/emotion experienced. To reflect this shift we decided therefore to include literal expression as well as non-literal (metaphoric) subject matter themes in our measurement of content expression. The inclusion of literal expression ensured that the younger children sampled were given credit for the technique they typically use to depict emotion, but if as expected older children drew upon a wider repertoire of

(metaphorical) expressive subject matter themes then their drawings would be attributed higher content expression scores. If children's emotional comprehension development (as measured by the TEC) predicts their expressive drawing performance (as measured by the number of expressive content themes) then it may be surmised that children's emotionally narrative The roles of emotional comprehension 8 drawings are benefiting from their wider and deeper understanding of the causes and influences on emotion.

While our content expression measure quantified the repertoire of subject matter the children depicted for expressive purposes, we included a second measure of expression that judged the overall quality of expressive merit in the drawings. Jolley et al. (2004) commented that any given drawing may express a mood poignantly but with few devices, or include an array of content themes and formal properties but with little overall expressive effect. It does not necessarily follow therefore that drawings showing a large repertoire of subject matter are judged as having more expressive merit. Nevertheless, the quality of expressive drawing may benefit from children's emotional comprehension development. For instance, children's increasing knowledge of the complexity of emotional situations, causes and influences affords the child an opportunity to access ideas for an expressive drawing beyond showing straightforward stereotypical themes (e.g. a birthday celebration for a happy drawing, a funeral scene for a sad drawing), or drawings of literal depictions only that do not provide an explanation for the emotion. In this sense judges may deem such drawings as displaying more creative, imaginative and poignant ideas for communicating expressive scenarios, and accordingly be considered of higher expressive merit.

Expressive drawing is likely to be not only dependent on the child’s emotional comprehension but also on the child's graphic ability in executing their emotional ideas. The large majority of children approach expressive drawing tasks by depicting subject matter to communicate their expressive ideas (Davis, 1997; Jolley, 2010). Therefore, the representations need to be at least recognizable of the topics depicted. Children with rudimentary graphic skill may encounter difficulties in depicting the intended content themes, particularly for expressive The roles of emotional comprehension 9 purposes, even if their emotional comprehension would allow them to understand the emotion that is to be depicted and to select an appropriate cause to this emotion. As children’s representational drawing skill improves with age up to at least 11 years old of age (see Jolley,

2010) this is likely to extend the repertoire of topics children feel confident in depicting for expressive purposes. Furthermore, higher levels of graphic skill may facilitate the quality of expressive execution of the content. We predicted therefore that children’s representational drawing skill (independently assessed) would account for a significant variance in both the number of expressive content themes and the quality of expression conveyed by those themes.

The study investigated the extent to which emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill accounted for variance in children’s expressive drawing performance as measured by the number of content themes and overall quality. Two age groups were chosen, 7- and 10- year-olds. In addition to the expected variation in emotional comprehension, representational drawing, and expressive drawing between children within each age group, previous research has consistently shown developmental progression between these two age groups for all three skills.

Method

Participants

Fifty children participated, 25 7-year-olds (M = 7;8, SD = 4 months, 12 boys and 13 girls) a nd 25 10-years-olds (M = 10;6, SD = 3 months, 13 boys and 12 girls). They attended schools in a French city. No children were known to have any emotional, handwriting or psychomotor diso rder. Also no attempt was made to select children gifted in art (children were randomly sampled from their classes). Parental consent was obtained for all the child participants.

Materials The roles of emotional comprehension 10

The materials used for the drawing tasks were white blank A4 paper, HB pencils, sets of ten coloured pencils (black, grey, brown, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink and red), erasers and identical 30cm high wooden mannequins of a man. The Test for Emotion

Comprehension (TEC; Pons & Harris, 2000) was also administered to the children.

Procedure

Participants completed two expressive drawing tasks (session 1), two representational drawing tasks (session 2) and the TEC (session 3), with a week between each session. The tasks were spread over three sessions to avoid overburdening children’s concentration. The expressive drawing tasks were presented first (and not counterbalanced with the representational drawing tasks) because the predetermined subject matter of the representational tasks may have given the idea to some children to use the same subject matter for the expression tasks (therefore potentially compromising our intention for the content of the expressive drawing tasks to be entirely child-motivated, as per the instructions). Transfer effects from the expressive to representational tasks were unlikely to occur as the instructions for the representational drawing tasks were very specifically directed to drawing certain subject matter (man, house) in a particular style (realism).

For the two drawing sessions all participants were tested in groups of five and were seated around a table in a vacant classroom. Children were spaced to prevent copying to ensure that eac h child's drawing performance was individually assessed, and in particular for the expressive dra wing tasks that children could not borrow emotional ideas from other children by inspecting their drawings. The children were tested individually on the TEC because the administration of this test requires a one-to-one interaction with the experimenter. The roles of emotional comprehension 11

For the expressive drawing tasks children were asked to produce a happy and a sad drawing on separate A4 paper in counterbalanced order, using as many of the pencils as they wanted to. All children were told that it did not matter what they drew as long as it looked like a happy (sad) picture. They were encouraged to draw the best pictures they could, but discouraged from looking at any other child’s drawing. In the representational drawing tasks session all children drew a man running (from a wooden mannequin model) and a house from memory in counterbalanced order. In the man drawing task each child was presented with his or her own model about 30cm away from the child and oriented in a profile view, with the man running to the right of each child's viewpoint. The children were encouraged to look carefully at the wooden man, and to draw exactly what they saw (but not the base or the pole) including the direction the man was running. In the house drawing task children were asked to draw a house, and to make it look as real and as life-like as they could. In the third session the TEC was administered according to the manual’s instructions. Each child was read a number of short emotional situations and asked to choose from a range of pictorial expressive faces the one that the child considered most reflected the emotion of the character in the story.

Scoring

The expressive drawings were assessed on two measures: the number of expressive subject matter themes depicted (‘content expression’) and the overall merit of expressiveness (‘quality of expression’). The content expression measurement was developed in a previous study (Jolley et al., 2003; see also Jolley, 2010) on happy and sad drawings made by a sample of 330 typically developing children and adults. In their study content analysis was applied to each mood set whereby two independent raters listed every item of content. After discussion between the raters, two lists of content items were agreed, one for each mood. The raters then independently The roles of emotional comprehension 12 generated subject matter themes in which they placed each item of content into thematic groupings. For instance, the content items ‘sun’, ‘clouds’, ‘sky’, ‘rain’, ‘lightening’ (etc.) were allocated to a ‘weather’ theme. Using content analysis these authors reported 15 themes of expressive content found in both the samples of happy and sad drawings: personification, season/health of vegetation and landscape, weather, person(s), disembodied body parts, celebrations/social/leisure activities, vehicles/transport and related items, buildings and internal components, animals, action, speech/thought bubbles, text, patterns/symbols/shapes, fantasy, and other/miscellaneous, with a further two themes particular to the sad drawings only (‘tools, weapons and restraints’ and ‘death, catastrophe, injury and accident’). Inspection of our sample of happy and sad drawings confirmed that all the items of content depicted could be attributed within this range of themes, without the need for additional themes. Each child’s content expression score was the total number of content themes in their happy and sad drawings expressed appropriately for the mood stated in the task instructions, and this included two themes of literal expression (person[s] and disembodied body parts).

For the quality of expression score each drawing was assessed by a 5-point Likert scale, anchored by the verbal labels of ‘very low quality of expression’ (1) and ‘very high quality of expression’ (5). No further guidance was given to allow the two raters the freedom to make their own subjective judgements. This method of scoring has been used previously in studies in which judges have rated the aesthetic quality of children's drawings (Bonoti & Misailidi, 2006;

Brechet, 2013; Cox, Koyasu, Hiranuma, & Perara, 2001; Cox, Perara, & Xu., 1999; Jolley et al.,

2004; Pariser & van den Berg, 1997). All ratings were made blind to the age and gender of the participants, but not to the intended mood of the drawing according to the task instructions. The roles of emotional comprehension 13

The drawings of the mannequin of a man were rated using a modified version of the rating scale devised by Cox, Perara, and Xu (1998). In addition to the original 11-point scale (where po ints are awarded for direction, overlap, partial occlusion, proportion, detail, and recognisability o f a person in relation to the model), additional points were included for the presence of head, tors o, arms, hands, legs and feet, and whether these were depicted as a line (1 point) or as a zone (2 p oints). These additional criteria allowed higher scores on the revised 23-point scale to be given t o more detailed and two-dimensional drawings. Rating criteria devised by Barrouillet, Fayol, an d Chevrot (1994) were reduced from the original 21-point scale to a 13-point scale to rate the ho use drawings. Three items were excluded because none of the children drew them (‘chimney’,

‘vertical chimney’, ‘folding out of house elements’). The item ‘at least a window’ was excluded because it was considered repetitious to the ‘two or more windows’ item used in our revised scal e. Three additional items related to windows were also excluded. ‘Two high windows’ was omit ted because it would have disadvantaged children who drew bungalows, ‘alignment of windows’ because it was too similar to ‘position of windows’, and ‘texture/shape of windows’ because the criteria was not sufficiently clear for what would constitute an emphasis of line. ‘Attic’ was excl uded because it was unrelated to the realism of the house drawing. Finally, the two items ‘path’ and ‘other buildings attached’ were relabelled as a single item ‘extraneous’. The revised list of it ems used in our scale was therefore: ‘outline of house’, ‘roof’, ‘roof shape’, ‘door’, ‘door handle’,

‘base of the house’, ‘two or more windows’, ‘position of windows’, ‘proportion of windows’, ‘c urtains’, ‘extraneous items’ and ‘perspective’. As per the original scale all items were allocated one point, with perspective 2 points. The 12 items in our revised scale therefore constituted a 1

3-point scale. Our revised scales for the man and house drawings were very similar to those used by Rose, Jolley and Charman (2012). The roles of emotional comprehension 14

Each child’s scores for the two representational drawing tasks were calculated as a percent age of the maximum score on each task. This percentage was then recalculated as a score out of

20 (a number chosen because it fell between the maximum scores on the man and house scales w e used). A mean was then taken of these two scores for the overall representational drawing abili ty score used in the analyses.

All the drawings were rated by two judges, both female 28-year-olds with a master’s degree in art. Intraclass correlations on the two judges’ scores for the content expression scores were very high for the happy drawings: ICC(C,k) = 0.985, 95% CI (.974, .992) and for the sad drawings: ICC(C,k) = 0.982, 95% CI (.968, .990). Intraclass correlations for quality of expression ratings were also very high for the happy drawings: ICC(C,k) = 0.974, 95% CI (.954, .985) and for the sad drawings: ICC(C,k) = 0.981, 95% CI (.966, .989). Similarly, intraclass correlations on the house ratings, ICC(C,k) = 0.992, 95% CI (.987, .996), and man ratings, ICC(C,k) = 0.993, 95% CI

(.987, .996) were very high. Differences were resolved by discussion between the two judges.

Children’s responses in the TEC were scored by the first author according to the manual

(maximum score 9 points).

Results

Table 1 presents mean scores (standard deviations) of each measure by age group and

Table 2 presents correlations between measures and with age. Figure 1 shows examples of representational drawings (man running and house) and Figure 2 presents examples of expressive drawings (happy and sad) by age group. We conducted hierarchical regressions analyses to examine whether age, representational scores and TEC scores were predictors of content expression and quality of expression scores. Age was placed in the first block, in order to examine the effect of representational scores and TEC scores when age is controlled, and to The roles of emotional comprehension 15 define the best model. Moreover, age was transformed to a dummy variable, coded “0” for 7 year-olds, and “1” for 10-year-olds. There was not multicolinearity (all VIF < 2). The distributions of the two dependent variables were normal (respectively, zcontent = 0.64, ns and zquality

= 0.34, ns). All residual distributions were normal and independent.

Results indicated that age significantly predicted content expression scores, R2 = 0.096, F

2 (1, 48) = 6.19, p < .05, p = 0.11, 10-year-olds had higher scores than 7-year-olds,  = 0.34, p

< .05. However, the best model contained age, representational scores and TEC scores, all these

2 2 variables explained 38% of content expression, R = 0.38, F (3, 46) = 10.99, p < .001, p = 0.42,

R2 = 0.30, p < .001. In this model, even though age contributed to the explanation of the total variance, it was not a significant predictor,  = 0.005, ns. On the contrary, higher representational scores explained a higher number of content expression themes,  = 0.366, p < .

05, and higher TEC scores also explained a higher number of content expression themes,  =

0.385, p < .01.

Age significantly predicted expressive quality scores, R2 = 0.067, F (1, 48) = 4.49, p < .05,

2 p = 0.09, 10-year-olds had higher scores than 7-year-olds,  = 0.29, p < .05. However, the best model contained age, representational scores and TEC scores, all these variables explained 37%

2 2 2 of expressive quality, R = 0.37, F (3, 46) = 10.56, p < .001, p = 0.41, R = 0.32, p < .001. In this model, even though age contributed to the explanation of the total variance, it was not a significant predictor,  = 0.04, ns. On the contrary, higher representational scores explained higher quality scores,  = 0.343, p < .05, and higher TEC scores explained higher quality scores,

 = 0.425, p < .01.

Discussion The roles of emotional comprehension 16

The data confirmed our predictions that children’s emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill accounts for a significant variance in their expressive drawing performance, as measured by both the number of expressive content themes and the overall quality of expression.

The link between superior emotional comprehension and an increasing number of expressive content themes drawn is consistent with studies examining children’s developing experience and knowledge about the situational determinants of emotions. For example, when 3 to 8 year olds were asked to tell narratives about a time when they felt various emotions, it has been shown that older children provided longer narratives (Peterson & Biggs, 2001) and used a greater number of categories (Strayer, 1986) than did younger children. Children may therefore not only verbalise more detailed and thematic expressive accounts but display more detailed and thematic expressive drawings as they develop their emotional comprehension. An increasing graphic repertoire of expressive subject matter themes is likely to also depend upon the development of representational drawing skill, a prediction confirmed by our findings. A certain level of representational ability is required for expression to be conveyed through subject matter

(Jolley, 2010), and the child’s increasing confidence in representing a wider repertoire of topics affords more opportunity to draw out their developing understanding of emotional causes.

Our reported significant association between emotional comprehension and quality of expressive drawing may be explained by a child’s increasing sensitivity to emotional situations allowing a wider choice from which the child can select a particularly poignant scenario for his or her expressive drawing. Research commenting on the way children choose to respond to expressive drawing tasks has shown that while younger children tend to draw a person with an expressive face, older children are more likely to draw a narrative scene/event that explains an The roles of emotional comprehension 17 emotion/mood (see Jolley, 2010). A drawing communicating a mood-laden event may be viewed by judges as having more expressive merit than a drawing that merely displays an emotion. Furthermore, if the child’s choice of event is considered to be imaginative and creative then this is likely to be further reflected in the assessment of the expressive quality of the drawing. Our data suggests, therefore, that a developing understanding of the complexities of emotion plays an important contribution to the quality of children’s expressive drawing. Clearly the expressive idea needs graphic execution, and the significant association between representational drawing skill and quality of expressive drawing supports that.

We believe also that our data can shed some light on previous research examining the ind ividual differences and wider processes involved in children making an expressive drawing. Joll ey (2010) suggested a three-part process in which the child (a) has the initial idea of expression,

(b) holds this idea in memory during the drawing process (together with using other information processing skills such as planning and attention), and (c) utilises drawing skill to execute the exp ressive idea held in mind. As we stated in the introduction, however, the small body of work inve stigating the relevant skills associated with each of these elements of the process has thrown up a somewhat mixed and inconsistent picture. In respect of the source of the expressive idea, a meas ure of children's visual metaphor comprehension was not consistently associated with measurem ents of children's expressive drawing (Winston et al., 1995). Although diverging thinking appear s to reveal more consistent associations with expressive drawing, the effect sizes were relatively weak (Picard & Bouhlais, 2011). We suggest that differences in children's emotional comprehen sion may mediate between the relationships of visual metaphor comprehension and/or diverging t hinking with expressive drawing. In the case of visual metaphor comprehension, for example, an increased understanding of emotional comprehension might allow children to bring to mind meta The roles of emotional comprehension 18 phorical messages that have emotional underpinnings, which in turn allows the child to go beyon d literal depictions of emotion in their drawings to using content and abstract techniques to symb olically communicate more subtle and deeper aspects of emotion. A similar explanation may app ly to divergent thinking, whereby understanding a wider repertoire of emotional causes may allo w divergent thinking skills to access those causes.

Emotional ideas for expressive drawing are likely to be constrained by the level of the chi ld’s working memory, as the child accesses the relevant subject matter from memory and works on these representations and the ideas of expression that drives how they will be presented in the drawing. Morra et al. (1994) found that working memory was significantly associated with the d rawing of metaphorical, but not literal, expression. The authors claimed that producing metaphor ical expression in pictures requires coordinating various pieces of information, and therefore pres ents a problem-solving activity in which working memory resources are utilised. In contrast, the y argued that literal depiction of emotion does not require working memory, merely the recalling of appropriate emotional features. We suggest therefore that children's early acquisition of under standing the basic emotions (for review, see Gross & Ballif, 1991) contributes to the early develo pmental signs of children drawing literal emotion. Whereas applying a more complex understan ding of emotion to a drawing requires an increasingly heavier working memory load as children consider simultaneously more complex external situational causes of emotion, theirs and others’ internal mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires), as well as societal/moral issues. Further work by

Morra and colleagues (Morra et al., 2011) of a positive link between TEC scores and working me mory support this position.

Our finding that representational drawing skill also significantly predicted children's expres sive drawing confirms the final process in Jolley's (2010) account of making an expressive drawi The roles of emotional comprehension 19 ng. Although positive associations between representational drawing skill and expressive drawin g have not always been significant in the literature, they do tend to be when children's representat ional drawing is measured across a number of tasks (see Jolley, Cox & Barlow, 2003, Picard et a l., 2007; Rose et al., 2012) as was the case in the present study, rather than a single drawing task

(see Jolley et al., 2004).

Although the age of the children significantly predicted higher scores in both expressive measures, age was not a significant predictor when emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill were taken into account. Therefore, our analyses showed that both emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill provided a significant contribution to the age-related developmental progression in expressive drawing scores. This finding does indicate that the age-related progressions in children's expressive drawing reported in the literature (for review, see Jolley, 2010) may be driven by older children's development in emotional comprehension and drawing skill. Nevertheless, our sample of only two age groups is a limitation of study, and further testing using more developmental points across a wider age range is needed to confirm this prediction. Furthermore, we acknowledge that emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill did not account for all the variance in expressive drawing scores. Our suggestion of how children's emotional comprehension may interact with other relevant skills needs to be tested directly. Future research assessing the respective roles of all these measures on a wider age range of children would be informative of the relevant skills (and their relative weight) that are involved in the process of making an expressive drawing. Such findings would then provide the basis for formulating a comprehensive theoretical account of expressive drawing. The roles of emotional comprehension 20

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Table 1.

Means (and standard deviations) of each measure by age group

Age group Measure 7-year-olds 10-year-olds Representationala 13.17 (2.35) 15.80 (1.80)

Content expressionb 6.44 (2.20) 8.20 (2.77) Quality of expressionc 2.66 (0.92) 3.24 (1.01) TECd 7.60 (0.96) 8.24 (0.78) Note.

a Continuous variable (0-20): scores ranged from 8 to 20

b Continuous variable (0-32): scores ranged from 2 to 13

c Continuous variable (1-5): scores ranged from 1 to 5

d Continuous variable (0-9): scores ranged from 5 to 9 The roles of emotional comprehension 26

Table 2.

Correlations between measures and with age

Expressive Drawing Representational TEC Age

drawing Content expression .55** .56** .34* Quality of expression .52** .57** .29* Note. * p < .05; ** p < .01 The roles of emotional comprehension 27

Figure Captions

Figure 1. Examples of representational drawings (man running and house) for each age group.

Figure 2. Examples of expressive drawings (happy and sad) for each age group. The roles of emotional comprehension 28 The roles of emotional comprehension 29 The roles of emotional comprehension 30

Endnote

Jolley et al. (2004) recommend expressive drawing tasks that allow children to choose their own topics through which expression is communicated, rather than setting tasks with pre-determined topics which some children may find difficult to draw expressively.