SelfhelpMagazine

by Julien Gross, MSc. & Harlene Hayne, Ph.D.

As every parent knows, getting young children to talk about emotional experiences is often difficult. Child therapy and children therapy routinely use drawing and other forms of art work to help children express what they cannot with words. The research program described below helps us better understand how drawing can help children overcome their limited verbal skills.

Psychologists Julien Gross, MSc., and Harlene Hayne, Ph.D., of the University of Otago, New Zealand, conducted two studies involving 60 children between the ages of 3 and 6. In the first experiment, half the children were asked to tell a trained interviewer about the time they were happy, sad, or scared (the tell group), while the other half were given 10 magic markers and asked to draw about the time they were happy, sad, or scared (the draw group).

The researchers found that children given the opportunity to draw while talking about their emotional experiences reported more information than children merely asked to verbally describe their experiences.

The second experiment was designed to determine whether the additional information provided by children while drawing concerning their emotional experiences was accurate. Children in this experiment were given the opportunity to draw and tell the interviewer about one emotion and to only tell about another.

Parents were asked to verify the accuracy of their child's emotional narrative. The results of this experiment indicated that even when the same child was interviewed using both procedures, he or she reported more information when asked to draw.

The researchers assert that drawing increases the amount of information that young children report about their own past experiences, regardless of their age or the emotional content of the target event. The psychologists note that the underlying mechanism responsible for the effect of drawing on children's recall of emotional experiences is not clear.

They hypothesize that drawing may facilitate children's reports for at least four reasons:

• drawing may reduce the perceived social demands of the interview;
• drawing may facilitate memory retrieval;
• drawing may help children organize their narratives;
• drawing may facilitate their interview performance simply because it extends the duration of the actual interview.

Yet the researchers caution that drawing, like all other forms of interviewing, is not immune to the negative effects of misleading or aggressive questioning. Like any other interview tool, it is only as effective as the professional using it.

The authors suggest that 3-6 year old children can retrieve their emotional experiences and provide detailed descriptions of those events through drawings. They assert that drawing may be particularly valuable in legal interviews with children where the accuracy of a child's report is crucial.

Drawing is very common form of communication in child therapy and child art therapy.

Reference:

"Drawing Facilitates Children's Verbal Reports of Emotionally Laden Events" by Julien Gross, Ph.D. & Harlene Hayne, Ph.D., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 1-17.

This information received from the American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC.