I started wondering this because I spent part of yesterday watching little kids paint with tempera, and looking at the whole table full of pictures of uniform lollipop trees and stick figure human beings got me to wondering about cultural influences on children’s artwork choices, and thence to the psychologists who will come in and look at the occasional upside-down purple tree and say, “This child must come from a broken home.” Or what about the kid who spent the entire class period mixing 15 different shades of green on his paper plate palette? “But you didn’t paint a picture!” He shrugs. Is he disturbed, or just more interested in the colors themselves than in painting a picture?
The premise is that you can supposedly tell whether a child is disturbed, having “problems”, by what his artwork looks like. The child psychologist is called in, asks the kid to draw certain pictures (“a house”, “Mommy”, “yourself”) and then is supposedly able to tell whether the kid is disturbed, and in what way, and then recommends a course of treatment.
Every time I run across this concept on the TV or in a magazine article, I wonder whether it’s true or just more of psychology’s “we have to protect our phony-baloney jobs” mumbo-jumbo.
So, does this work, or is it a crock? If there’s a standard way, for example, that a kindergartner is supposed to draw a human being or a tree, it doesn’t seem to leave much room for the kid who “thinks outside the box”.
If the kid is asked to draw himself, and he draws himself covered in blood and drinking the blood of those that dared oppose him, then you might want to call the psychologist.
There might be something to it if the kid constantly draws disturbing pictures. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the child is actually disturbed, unless by disturbed we simply mean “concerned about somthing”. Too many pictures of bombs going off, and you might conclude that the child is concerned about terrorism or nuclear war, and shouldn’t watch the evening news unsupervised. Kids are impressionable, and the things that have become impressed upon them may come out in their drawings.
If the drawings have an obvious literal interpretation, they may be a useful tool for teachers to see that there might be serious problems at home (pictures of dad with daggers sticking out of his eyes = possible child abuse or wife beating?) But if it’s just a matter of the kid spending an hour mixing various shades of yellow together, well maybe the kid just can’t paint worth a durn.
It’s not a refund when the auditor leaves two twenties on your nightstand.
I’d say that even if a kid does tend to violent imagery in one particular medium, it’s still probably not a cause for worry. Most of my favorite poems, for instance, deal with death-- A lot of Poe, Dickenson’s Since I Could Not Stop for Death, Donne’s Death Be Not Proud, etc. I’m not a goth or anything, and so far as I and every psychiatrist I’ve ever been to know, I’m perfectly well adjusted. If, however, a child tends towards the same sort of disturbing imagery in, say, visual arts, music, literature, etc., then there may (or, of course, may not) be a problem.
On a related note, there’s a well-accepted test of intelligence where a child is asked to draw a man. The test is evaluated not by the quality of the artwork, or by what the man is doing, but by how much detail the child includes. There’s a standard for scoring based on just what details are included; eyelashes, for example, a worth a lot of points.
Chronos, that’s the kind of test I’m talking about, but what I wanna know is, is there any validity to it as a diagnostic tool? Maybe the kid just draws people that way because his big brother draws them that way. And who invented it, and who decided how many “body parts included” signified sanity?
My sister-in-law went to school for art therapy. Pretty cool if you ask me!
She came down to visit while my son was in the hospital, and was looking through some of the cards that his class mates had made for him.
She picked out a few things like those who drew trees and had them firmly rooted or those that weren’t. Those that depicted happy thougts and those that didn’t. One child even drew a hallmark on the back of her card. Media influence? Or a family habit?
You could also tell those that had religious backgrounds, or atleast paid attention to Joshuas’. We got many covered in Penticals.
Some of my son’s artwork has been evaluated from time to time. The evaluations have been consistent, regardless of who the “interpreter” was or whether two “interpreters” knew each other, etc.
First off, they do include the child’s age and the child’s physical development (including hand-eye-coordination) in the evaluation. They also seem to not look at specific items in the picture (such as weapons) so much as the overall composition.
Pictures in which the child is shown as very much smaller or very much larger than any other person in the picture indicate certain attititudes. Pictures in which people are placed near each other or far from each other indicate different things. (For example, a self portrait of the child receiving or giving a gift where the giver and the recipient are at opposite ends of an 11 inch wide piece of paper does not say the same thing as a picture in which the giver and the recipient are both standing in the center.)
I would also say that the conclusions drawn from my sons’ pictures have led the psychologists to very smilar conclusions as those my wife and I had arrived at by daily interaction with my son. I would say that pictures are one tool in a psychologist’s bag of tricks. If I ever heard of a child being institutionalized solely on the “evidence” of pictures the child had drawn, I would really raise Holy Ned. But as one tool among many, I think that pictures are valuable.
Chronos: “On a related note, there’s a well-accepted test of intelligence where a child is asked to draw a man.
The test is evaluated not by the quality of the artwork, or by what the man is doing, but by how much detail the child includes. There’s a standard for scoring based on just what details are included; eyelashes, for example, a worth a lot of points.”
I can’t remember much of this “test” but there is one that goes by age or maturity. My favorite part is the belly button and how kids just “hafta” include it until a certain age when it is no longer totally 100% necessary. A child who had been coached on what to draw by her parents, completed her drawing and confided that she really wanted to have a belly button but her mother said she must not.
Tomndeb’s comments match what I’ve seen in and around schools. By itself a picture can not be diagnostic of much of anything, but as a part of a group of tests, drawings might be very helpful.
When asked to draw a picture of their family, most kids draw each person with some degree of size-ratio…Dad’s big, Mom’s a bit smaller, Lil Brother is smaller yet.
They tend to draw themselves, however, much larger than the ratio would dictate–sometimes they draw themselves larger than their dad.
Very sick children, OTOH, draw themselves smaller than the ratio. Often times, especially when the child knows that he or she has a terminal illness, they will omit themselves from the picture entirely.
Of course, this is only one test out of many that the psychologist will use, but the proportions which the child has drawn himself can tell a lot about the kid’s frame of mind.
To my knowledge, this is most often used as a test for depression instead of outright psychosis.
I forgot this part: “If there’s a standard way, for example, that a kindergartner is supposed to draw a human being or a tree, it doesn’t seem to leave much room for the kid who ‘thinks outside the box’.”
The kindergartner is a good example, at that age there is only so much of the hand to eye coordination in place, only so much of the ability to manipulate the crayons in place, only so much of the child’s visual image of people (and trees) in place. The drawings are really standard, there is only so much a child can do at each age/maturity level and thinking “outside the box” isn’t as much of a problem as you might think.
One of my little buddies knows moon stages and planet risings, locates them in the sky and talks about them. He’s almost six and his drawings of people look pretty much the same as the other kids his age, but his pictures have little blobs in them - stars.
Heir Hitlers artwork has been studied for years over this same issue.
The consensus is that his art, while bad, does not show a proclivity toward mass-murder or megalomania.
A few clarifying notes on the test that I described: First of all, the test that I was describing is not a test of sanity; it is a test of intelligence. As to “how many parts you need to include”, like I mentioned before, it depends on the parts. Eyelashes are worth more than having a head.
Secondly, while there may well be diagnostics that can be applied to pre-drawn artwork, the test I was describing is always given under controlled circumstances: The instructions are the same, word-for-word for each child, the child must draw the picture at the time of the test, there’s no input fromanyone else while the test is being administered, etc.
That said, I also once remember being asked to draw a picture of my mother, as part of a series of psychological tests. I drew her squatting down working in the garden, which I guess was acceptable, as the shrink said afterwards that I was within the normal range. Then again, maybe that indicates psychosis, and was just balanced out by the rest of the tests I took. shrug
So far, this thread has only discussed artwork as an indicator of psychological, non-physiological conditions. What about a kid (or adult) being “disturbed” as a result of a specific neurological condition? I know that drawing a clock with the hands set at a specific time is now used as a diagnostic tool to indicate the possible presence of Alzheimer’s disease for an elderly patient; are there any such tests applied to the general public or to kids in particular? Could you tell a kid had rabies by looking at his finger paintings?
While I am not aware of the test you discuss, the drawing of a clock is a very useful test for a number of neurological syndromes. After a stroke, for example, the clock drawing can reveal ‘hemi-neglect’ where a patient begins to percieve only one half of their universe (left or right)
I’d recommend the works of Oliver Sacks (perhaps the classic for this type of syndrome is “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat”, though his other works, like “Awakenings”, “An Anthropologist on Mars”, etc. also made the NY Time Bestseller list.
He gets a bit lyrical, and carried away with the ‘wonder’ of it all, rather than precise detail, but apparently it goes over well with lay audiences. I myself found it entertaining on first reading, and interesting in a very different way after medical school. He has a talent for drawing vignettes – every good physician has hundreds of memorable patients that taught him/her a lot about the human condition as well as about disease. Sacks can ‘draw’ his patients in such memorable terms that I feel like they were my patients and my experiences, and learn the same lessons.
I don’t say that art is NEVER revealing, and there might very well be cases in which disgusting or violent subject matter may be a sign of mental illness… but we have to be VERY careful about snap judgements.
I went to a fairly prestigious Catholic high school in New York, and I recall one of the first assignments we were given in freshman English class. We had just finished reading some LEwis Carroll, and were assigned to write our own Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass world, based on our own high school.
Naturally, being a bunch of 14 year old wise guys, we all wrote stories in which our least favorite teachers were portrayed as ridiculous creatures… and most of us dreamed up all sorts of horrible/gross/sick tortures to put those teachers through.
Now, were any of us murderous psychopaths? No, on the contrary! Most of us were introverted nerds who never got into trouble. Today, most of us are doctors, lawyers, academics, engineers and pillars of the community. But a shrink who read out stories, and saw the torurous deaths we planned for our teachers might well have concluded that we were all Dylan Klebolds, and ordered us locked up!
So, I’m very hesitant to endorse reading too much into art or creative writing. YEs, some images CAN be signs of psychotic rage… but don’t forget, kids (especially boys) USUALLY like gross images, and we shouldn’t always read too much into that.
We are probably discussing 6 different things each in our own way.
However, Astorian, anyone trained to evaluate the drawings or writings of children would know exactly what to expect from 14 year old boys. Would probably have read through your class mates work and said, “Same old, same old.”
We all develop in pretty much the same way and same speed with variations that can be expected and planned upon. There was a guy named Piaget who took the time to observe the minute activities of infants, babies, children and wrote up his findings for normal activities, behaviors, development. The Gesell or Gessel Institute did something along the same lines. What is different sticks out.
A professional would certainly be able to tell something is odd about the artwork a particular child. Make a diagnosis on one picture? No.
If you were teaching third grade and asked everyone to make a self portrait on a 9 x 11 piece of white drawing paper you’d get 25 different drawings - some with wallpaper, some with dogs, some with upside down question marks for noses, some skin colors might be bazaar, some eye colors might be frightening, some hair would look like straw and some have neat, equal, even braids. While a couple of kids would have artistic ability and some be unable to color within their own lines, you’d see roughly the same skill level and be able to recognize most of the children.
What would you say if one of these self portraits was a gray face and no features? Or a Picasso-like with one eye, no mouth and breasts? Children with problems, who are different don’t add an extra line here or there, those children often do express that unusualness in art.
Again, what does it mean? All by itself, nothing. To a child phychologist? With tests and interviews?
Jois… I don’t doubt that serious, intelligent, experienced psychologists can tell the difference between typical schoolboy gross-out humor and true sociopathy. But somehow, I doubt whether the typical grade school or junior high school guidance counselor is a Piaget in-the-making.
Indeed, most of the guidance counselors I experienced at school were utterly out to lunch, and had no clue what made little boys tick. And I don’t think I’m atypical.
You’ve probably read/heard about those 6 year olds who were suspended from school for pointing their fingers and shouting “bang bang.” I don’t mean to suggest that such excesses are commonplace, but they do suggest that a lot of school guidance counselors don’t know what they’re doing. Are they incompetent? Or are they driven by ideology (ANY sign of aggression by boys must be nipped in the bud, lest they grow up to be oppressive members of the patriarchy!)?
Either way, such bozos are out there, and THEY are the ones who will make the determinations whether a student is a dangerous nut, or just an ill-behaved little boy. So, I’m far less sanguine that Jois.
