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STUDIES FIND DRAWING FACILITATES CHILDREN'S ABILITY TO TALK ABOUT EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES
WASHINGTON - As every parent knows, getting young children to talk about emotional experiences is often difficult. But new research suggests that one way to overcome this problem is giving children an opportunity to draw while they talk. In an article to be published in the June issue of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, researchers report that when relaying an emotional experience, children who drew as they spoke reported more than twice as much information than children asked only to talk about their experiences. Furthermore, the additional information did not occur at the expense of accuracy.
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 tell about 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.
The authors conclude that their findings suggest that even very young children can retrieve appropriate examples of their own emotional experiences and provide detailed descriptions of the emotion-generating events. They assert that drawing may be particularly valuable legal interviews with children in which the accuracy of their reports is crucial.
Article: "Drawing Facilitates Children's Verbal Reports of Emotionally Laden Events" by Julien Gross, Ph.D., and Harlene Hayne, Ph.D., University of Otago, in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 1-17.
(Full Text available from the APA Public Affairs Office)
Harlene Hayne, Ph.D. can be reached at 011-64-3-479-7636 or [email protected]
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 50 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 59 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.
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