Croatian children's experience of war is not reflected in the size and placement of emotive topics in their drawings.

OBJECTIVES: The claim that topics in children's drawings convey the children's emotional attitude towards those topics was investigated. DESIGN: The influence of an emotional topic (neutral man, friendly and enemy soldier) and trauma group (child with father or father killed in war) was examined on the size of the topics and their placement relative to a self-portrait drawing. METHODS: Sixty Croatian children drew a man, followed on a separate page by either (a) a Croatian soldier, (b) an enemy soldier or (c) a second drawing of a man. The child's self-portrait drawing was placed on each page. RESULTS: There were no significant main or interaction effects on size or placement of topic. CONCLUSIONS: There are unlikely to be reliable features of drawings that portray the child's emotional attitude towards the topic drawn.

Realist errors in children's responses to pictures and words as representations.

In three experiments we examined the judgments made by 3- to 4- year-old children about out-of-date physical representations which no longer matched their referents. The referent was a doll wearing a sticker, and the sticker was swapped for a different one after a picture had been drawn of the initial state of affairs (Experiments 1 and 2) or after the name of the doll and its original sticker had been written down (Experiment 3). We confirmed previous findings of realist errors in identity judgments for pictures and showed also that children tended to misidentify the name of a sticker in a written list to match a change to its referent. Thus, realist errors are not confined to representations which are iconically similar to their referents. Furthermore, children also judged incorrectly that the pictures and words had actually been changed, indicating that realist errors to external representations extend to operations performed on their referents as well as to their identities.

Drawing conclusions: a re-examination of empirical and conceptual bases for psychological evaluation of children from their drawings.

PURPOSE: Although consideration of children's art work (usually drawings) in clinical investigations of children referred to psychologists is fairly common, there is little evidence for the reliability and validity of such assessments. We consider a variety of possible mechanisms which could operate to influence the characteristics of children's drawings, and review the evidence that such mechanisms operate to allow meaningful psychological evaluations of children from their drawings. METHODS: The problem for making a reliable interpretation of the significance of a drawing is that a given feature could plausibly support several very different interpretations, depending which of many possible processes was active or dominant in the production of the drawing. Evidence from studies of clinical populations and experimental studies with non-selected samples are reviewed in the light of these possibilities. RESULTS: The review indicates that drawings are inaccurate and unreliable as personality or state assessments but can be influenced by children's emotional attitudes towards the topics depicted. The form of that expression, however, may be personal and idiosyncratic. Analogue studies of these effects undertaken with non-clinical samples under controlled conditions have produced mixed results. At best the reported effects are small. CONCLUSIONS: Children's drawings on their own are too complexly determined and inherently ambiguous to be reliable sole indicators of the emotional experiences of the children who drew them. Further research is needed to establish the extent to which such drawings can usefully facilitate assessment of children by other means or provide useful support as one of several converging lines of evidence.