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The autistic impairments in emotional and social competence, imagination and generating ideas predict qualitative differences in expressive drawings by children with autism beyond that accounted by any general learning difficulties. In a sample of 60 5-19-year-olds, happy and sad drawings were requested from 15 participants with non-savant autism and compared with those drawn by three control groups matched on either degree of learning difficulty (MLD), mental age (MA) or chronological age (CA). All drawings were rated by two artists on a 7-point quality of expression scale. Contrary to our predictions, the drawings from the autistic group were rated similar to those of the MA and MLD groups. Analysis of the people and social content of the drawings revealed that although children with autism did not draw fewer people, they did draw more immature forms than mental age controls. Furthermore, there was tentative evidence that fewer social scenes were produced by the autism sample. We conclude that the overall merit of expressive drawing in autism is commensurate with their general learning difficulties, but the social/emotional impairment in autism affects their drawings of people and social scenes.

This study sought to explain the apparently conflicting age-incremental and U-shaped developmental patterns found for the merit of expressive drawing by examining the role of representational realism drawing ability in the observed age patterns. Thirty children in each of seven age groups from young children to preadolescence (4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11 and 12 years) were randomly sampled. Two further groups (normative and artist) of 14-year-olds and young adults were included to assess expressive drawing shown late in development. Each participant completed three expressive drawings (happy, sad, and angry) and three visual-realism drawing tasks. The expressive drawings were assessed on five measures of expressive merit (overall quality, color, composition, line, and content) developed and scored by two adult artists. The data analyses were performed on those scores (i.e., raw scores) and those scores when statistically adjusted for performance on the realism drawing tasks. The raw expressive drawing scores linearly increased up to preadolescence. Linear trends continued for the artist adolescent and adult samples, but tailed off and declined in curvilinear relationships for the normative counterparts. By contrast, the analyses yielded a U-shaped curve in the merit of expressive drawings when those scores were statistically adjusted by realism drawing performance: young children and adolescent/adult sample showed elevated merit, more notably the later sample when artists were considered. The findings suggest the previously reported age-incremental patterns were influenced by a consideration of realism drawing ability in the assessment, while the Ushape curve de-emphasises representational realism in the content of the drawings.Expressive Drawing Development Linear U-shape Linear and U-shape trends 3 Linear and U-shape trends in the development of expressive drawing from pre-schoolers to normative and artistic artistsThe process of drawing promotes many psychological benefits for children, including visual thinking, observation and the analysis of subject matter, problem solving, imagination, expression, creativity, as well as more general habits of thinking such as perseverance, experimentation and reflection (Arnheim, 1969;Barnes, 2002;Burkitt, Rose & Jolley, 2010;Hetland, Winner, Veenema & Sheridan, 2013). Furthermore, producing the artefacts develops children's drawing ability, both for their representational drawing of the subjects depicted and their expressive drawing of emotional/conceptual messages. There is a general convergence in the literature that with age children denote subject matter in forms of increasing visual likeness (for reviews, see Cox, 2005;Jolley, 2010). However, there is a vibrant debate regarding the developmental pattern of children's expressive drawing. An influential claim for a U-shape pattern posits that very young children produce drawings of similar expressive quality to the works created by artistic adolescents and adults, with a dip in artistic merit in the intervening middle c...