The Roles of Emotional Comprehension and Representational Drawing Skill in Children’s Expressive Drawing

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.