How Children Draw, Write and Tell About Portraying Mixed Emotions in Themselves and Others Children

Abstract

Children alter their drawings in multiple ways depending on whether they are drawing happy, sad or mixed happy and sad experiences. However, their explanations of why they may use features to show emotions may be overlooked in interpretation. The present study therefore used the Draw–Write–Tell paradigm which integrates children's explanations of feature use to explore children's drawn representations of mixed emotional experiences. 92 (42 boys, 50 girls) children between the ages of 6–8 years (6 years 4 months–7 years 11 months, M = 7 years 2 months, SD = 3 months) were recruited on the basis of age from mainstream schools across the South East and South West of the UK. Children were allocated to one of two conditions hearing either a vignette about themselves (n = 46, 22 girls) or another age and gender matched child (n = 47, 27 girls). Following a mixed emotion presence interview, all children competed the Draw–Write–Tell process. Eleven themes of how children explained how they drew mixed emotion experiences emerged following an exhaustive thematic analysis indicating individual, prosocial and cultural influences on their drawing choices. The importance of using this approach when interpreting children's drawings of emotional experiences is discussed.