Does Children's Colour Use Reflect the Emotional Content of their Drawings?

Abstract

When children draw in clinical contexts, clinicians sometimes rely on children's colour use to make inferences about their emotional reaction to the subject of the drawing. Here, we examined whether children use colour to portray emotion in their drawings. In Experiment 1, children indicated their colour preferences and then coloured in outlines of figures characterized as nasty or nice. Children also drew complex, multi‐coloured pictures about their own happy or sad experiences. In Experiment 2, hospitalized children drew about being worried or scared in hospital and about their positive experiences. In both experiments, we examined the relation between children's colour use and their colour preferences. Three‐ to 10‐year‐old children used more preferred colours to colour in the nice outline. Although they were more likely to use non‐preferred colours to colour in the nasty outline, they tended to used a mix of preferred and non‐preferred colours. When both normal and hospitalized children produced drawings about positive and negative events, there was no relation between children's colour choices and their colour preferences; children primarily used preferred colours. These data suggest that clinicians should exercise extreme caution when interpreting the meaning of colour in children's drawings. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Expressivity in children's drawings of themselves for adult audiences with varied authority and familiarity

“…The projective approach examines features in children's drawings for emotional meaning (Koppitz, , ), such as small figure size representing fear; this has been found to be unreliable as indicators of emotion leading for calls of extreme caution when projecting meaning into children's drawings (Burkitt, ; Crawford, Gross, Patterson, & Hayne, ; Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, ; Strange, Hoynck Van Papendrecht, Crawford, Candel, & Hayne, ; Woolford et al ., ). The present study follows an approach which investigates how children alter drawing strategies when provided with contrasting emotional characterizations of topics (Burkitt, ; Jolley, Fenn, & Jones, ; Picard & Gauthier, ; Picard et al ., ).…”

Victor and the Dragon

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A descriptive study of trends in the pictures drawn by primary school learners in South Africa

“…In this study, bright colours correlated with the absence of depression and the use of darker colours with the presence of depression. Many authors have warned against reading too much into the colours that children use when drawing pictures (Crawford et al, 2012;Dolidze et al, 2013;Alter-Muri and Vazzano, 2014). They also found that children tend to use their best or favourite colour more when drawing pictures.…”

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