![]() ![]() She found that children modified the shape of the lips to differentiate the faces according to the required emotion. One of the first authors to deal empirically with these topics (about thirty years ago) was Golomb, who asked children from 1st to 6th grade of primary school to draw a happy, a sad, and an angry child (Golomb, 2004). According to these studies some properties of drawings, such as figure size, shape, or color, do possess an emotional meaning that can be investigated systematically.Ī few studies, however, provided data about children’s ability to represent facial expressions, and about the pictorial equivalents employed for this purpose. In relatively recent years a number of studies have examined the development of children’s ability to represent expressive faces, either explicitly requiring an emotional connotation or proposing an evocative theme (see Burkitt et al., 2019, Laghi et al., 2014 Pezzica et al., 2016, as recent examples including references to other relevant papers). However, children’s depictions of facial expressions have not received the same attention that has been given to the completeness and accuracy of the entire figure, as well as other emotional cues. To these ends, various aspects of human figure drawing have been taken into account, such as visual realism and symbolic value of the shapes. Bombi et al., 2020 Rabaglietti et al., 2012). Moreover, this kind of drawing has been the basis for a number of psychological instruments designed to assess children’s intellectual maturity and emotional adaptation (see Matto, 2007 for a synthesis) as well as interpersonal relationships (e.g. Human beings are one of the earliest and most common subjects of children’s drawings, and the development of the human figure drawing has been extensively studied (Cox, 1993). This study was aimed at verifying if children introduce emotional expressions in their drawings of human faces, even if not explicitly requested if so, we wanted to verify if a preferential expression exists and if children’s pictorial choices change with increasing age. However, with increasing age this representation gave way to a variety of basic emotions (sadness, fear, anger, surprise), whose representation may depend from the ability to modify the shapes of both eyes and mouth and changing communicative aims of the child. The results confirmed that only a small number of faces were expressionless, and that the most frequent emotion was happiness. ![]() Data were submitted to non-parametric tests to compare the frequencies of expressions (absolute and by age) and the frequencies of visual cues (absolute and by age and expressions). ![]() We also expected that with the improving ability to keep into account both mouth and eyes appearance, other expressions would be found besides the smiling face. In the light of data from previous studies of emotion drawing on request, and the literature about preferred emotional expressions, we expected that an emotion would be portrayed even by the younger participants, and that the preferred emotion would be happiness. without mentioning an emotional characterization. Drawings were collected with the Draw-a-Man test instructions, i.e. This study was aimed at verifying if children introduce emotional expressions in their drawings of human faces, and if a preferential expression exists we also wanted to verify if children’s pictorial choices change with increasing age. ![]()
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