How do children draw? It depends on who is looking

• Children's drawings are used as a communication tool in several professional / therapeutic contexts
• They help a range of professionals understand how a child feels
• The results of the study show that children vary according to their way of drawing themselves according to the profession of the audience and according to whether they are familiar or not with the child.
• The findings will help practitioners better interpret children's own drawings.

This is the archetype of the child: his family, his pet, maybe a house and his garden, and the child himself. However, how do children represent themselves in their drawings and does this representation change depending on who will look at the photo?

A research team led by academics from the University of Chichester examined this issue and found that the expressive drawings of themselves for children vary according to authority and familiarity with the adult who will see the photo. The study is published today 25 January 2019 in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.

The results of the study are significant because it is important to understand children's drawings for different audiences. The drawings are often used in clinical, medico-legal, educational and therapeutic situations to gather information on what a child feels and to complete the verbal communication.

The research team worked with 175 children aged 8 and 9, 85 boys and 90 girls. The children were divided into seven groups – one group without hearing and six hearing groups varying according to the type of hearing. These groups represented professionals (police, teacher) and men with whom the children were familiar and those with whom they were not.

The children were asked to draw three pictures of themselves – a basic picture, a happy one and a sad one.

The results of the study show that the children 's drawings are more expressive if the audience of these drawings is familiar to the child. Girls are more expressive than boys.

Some anomalies appeared in the results. For example, boys and girls had different performances in the happy and sad designs of known and unknown police groups. The girls showed more expressiveness than the boys in their happy drawings when the audience was a policeman they knew, while the sad drawings of the boys showed more expressiveness than the girls in the unknown police group. Although the authors of the study suggest the reasons, they believe that it would be good to study further.

They also suggest that this current study could serve as a basis for future studies of other professional and personal interactions, such as between a physician and his patient.

The study was led by Dr. Esther Burkitt, a psychology researcher at the University of Chichester. She commented, "The present study builds on the results of previous studies conducted by our team and its findings have implications for the use of children's drawings by professionals as a means of To complement and improve verbal communication Being aware that children can draw emotions differently for different occupational groups can help practitioners better understand what the child feels about the topics being addressed. to serve as a basis for a discussion with the child as to why they have provided certain information to certain persons, a profession that the children think they are drawing themselves and if they know a member of this profession. "

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Expressiveness in children's drawings of themselves for an adult audience with varied authority and familiarity

Short title: Expressiveness drawn by children for audiences with varied authority and familiarity

Dr. Esther Burkitt1, Dr. Dawn Watling2 and Hannah Message3

1 University of Chichester 2 Royal Holloway, University of London 3 University of Chichester

doi: 10.1111 / bjdp.12278

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