Drawing self and others: How do children with autism differ from those with learning difficulties?

When children draw pictures of human beings, they reveal things not only about their general intellectual and artistic abilities, but also about their awareness and conception of themselves and others. What might the human figure drawings of children with autism reveal about their images of self and other – and what might they disclose about social factors that shape the drawings of children who do not have autism? On the basis of an hypothesis about the restricted social awareness of children and adolescents with autism, we predicted that there would be little differentiation between their drawings of themselves and other people. To test this prediction, we investigated a group of children and adolescents with autism and a group with learning difficulties but not autism (N = 14 per group) who were individually matched for both chronological age and verbal mental age. Participants with autism mostly drew human figures that were little distinguished from one another, but introduced clear contrasts among their houses, whereas most of those with learning difficulties drew distinctive human figures as well as houses. These different profiles of performance occurred despite similarities in the numbers and kinds of feature included in the drawings, and the individuality of participants' drawing styles. Although the results were in keeping with our hypothesis that human figure drawings might reflect abnormalities in the way that children with autism mentally represent themselves and others, we conclude by stressing our tentativeness over this interpretation of the findings.     

Social Emotions in Children's Human Figure Drawings: Drawing Shame,Pride and Jealousy

The study examines children's ability to convey social – as opposed to basic – emotions in their human figure drawings. One hundred children aged 4‐, 6‐ and 8‐years were asked to draw a person experiencing shame, pride, jealousy, happiness, sadness and fear as well as a baseline figure ‘feeling nothing’. Drawings were rated in terms of (i) overall emotional expressiveness and (ii) variety and types (face, body/posture and context) of graphic cues used to convey emotion. The effect of age on overall expressiveness and use of these graphic cues was also investigated. The results showed that drawings depicting social emotions were rated as less expressive and presented fewer graphic cues than those conveying basic emotions. Children's developing ability to depict pride, shame and jealousy was largely driven by an increased use of contextual cues in their human figure drawings. As regards the effect of age, it was found that 6‐ and 8‐years old produced more expressive drawings containing a larger range of graphic cues than the 4‐year olds. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Roles of Emotional Comprehension and Representational Drawing Skill in Children's Expressive Drawing

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the roles of emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill in children's expressive drawing. Fifty 7‐ to 10‐year‐olds were asked to produce two (happy and sad) expressive drawings, two representational drawings (drawing of a man running and drawing of a house) and to answer the Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons & Harris, 2000). The expressive drawings were assessed on the number of expressive subject matter themes (‘content expression’) and the overall quality of expression on a 5‐point scale. Each of the representational drawings was measured on a scale assessing detail and visual realism criteria, and contributed to a single representational drawing skill score. In line with our predictions, we found that both emotional comprehension and representational drawing skill accounted for a significant variance in children's expressive drawings. We explain that children's developing emotional comprehension may allow them to consider more detailed and poignant expressive ideas for their drawings and that their developing representational drawing skill facilitates the graphic execution of these emotional ideas. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The development of children's expressive drawing

Two studies are presented on expressive happy and sad drawings made by British 4‐ to 12‐year‐olds (n = 80 and 160, respectively) in which the drawings were assessed individually for the quantity and quality of expressive devices. Quantity was measured in the number of appropriate expressive content themes and formal properties evident in each drawing. Quality was rated on a Likert scale on the extent to which the drawing expressed the intended mood. Both the quantity and quality of expressive happy and sad drawings of predetermined and free topics increased with age. Improvements in content expression, but much less so with expressive formal properties, accounted for the development of quantity. A slower period of development between 6 and 9 years for both measures was consistently found, with a significant improvement often shown among the 12‐year‐olds. The finding that happy drawings were scored higher than sad drawings is explained in respect of adult and child expectations of pictures. Correlations between expressive scores and performance on a visual realism drawing task tentatively indicated that expressive and realism skills in drawing are only weakly related. The development of expressive drawing is considered in the context of the delivery of art education in schools.     

Anticipatory concern: a study in autism

There has been substantial research on children's empathic responsiveness towards distressed people, and on the limited responsiveness of children with autism. To date, however, there have not been experimental studies to test how far children show concern towards someone who might be expected to feel badly, when that person has not (yet) expressed any negative feelings. We tested matched groups of children with autism and learning disability, and typically developing children of similar verbal mental age (approximately 6 years), with a novel procedure in which participants witnessed one person (E1) tearing the drawing of another (E2). In a comparison condition, a blank card was torn. In the torn‐drawing condition, as predicted, fewer participants with autism orientated towards E2 with an immediate look, and as a group, they were rated as showing less concern for, and fewer concerned looks towards, E2. We discuss possible implications for theoretical perspectives on the early development of empathy in typically as well as atypically developing children.     

Sex differences in expressive drawing

We examined sex differences in expressive drawings produced by 105 boys and 105 girls aged 9-15 years. The drawings were classified according to the type of expressive strategy used to depict emotion (literal, content, abstract, or any combination of these), and rated according to the complexity of that strategy. A creative/divergent thinking task (figural form) was used to assess the relationship between expressive drawing and figural creativity. As predicted, girls scored higher than boys on the expressive drawing task. Specifically, girls relied less often on literal strategies alone and were more likely to combine literal expression with metaphorical (content and abstract) expression than boys. There was a linear relationship between expressive drawing and divergent thinking scores. These results are consistent with the idea that boys and girls differ in the expressive component of emotion, and suggest that these sex differences extend to the expressive drawing domain. They also suggest that divergent thinking may be involved in the ability to draw expressively.     

Drawing what lies ahead: False intentions are more abstractly depicted than true intentions

The aim of this study was to examine how people mentally represent and depict true and false statements about claimed future actions—so‐called true and false intentions. On the basis of construal level theory, which proposes that subjectively unlikely events are more abstractly represented than likely ones, we hypothesized that false intentions should be represented at a more abstract level than true intentions. Fifty‐six hand drawings, produced by participants to describe mental images accompanying either true or false intentions, were rated on level of abstractness by a second set of participants (N = 117) blind to the veracity of the intentions. As predicted, drawings of false intentions were rated as more abstract than drawings of true intentions. This result advances the use of drawing‐based deception detection techniques to the field of true and false intentions and highlights the potential for abstractness as a novel cue to deceit.     

L'interprétation d'indices non verbaux par les enfants

Interpreting appropriately face expressions and analyzing social relations between people, according to their actions are useful competence for treating pragmatic aspects of communication. We do research on these competences by presenting a recognition emotion task, and a task in which movements of geometrical figures simulate social interaction, to 98 children (children aged 8, 10, 12 and 14 years, children with autism and mental retardation). Results show that answers qualitatively increase with age, even after 12 years. Children with autism encounter more difficulties to recognize emotional expression than to attribute intentional actions. Emotion recognition is related to simple intention attribution but not with complex one, which develops later.     

Children's developing ability to depict emotions in their drawings

55 children aged 5 to 9 years were asked to draw pictures depicting happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and fear as well as pictures that did not express any emotion. These pictures were then scored by nonexpert adults for their overall emotional expressiveness, that is, how well they depicted the intended emotion. The results showed that drawings were generally regarded by adults as emotionally expressive. Happiness was the emotion most easily recognized in children's drawings, closely followed by sadness. The results also showed a linear increase in ratings of emotional expressiveness with age.     

Autism and the double empathy problem: Implications for development and mental health

This article proposes a link between autistic people being misperceived by the neurotypical majority and their being at risk of poor mental health and well-being. We present a transactional account of development in which the misperceptions (and consequent behaviour) of the neurotypical majority influences the perceptions and behaviour of autistic people such that they become increasingly separate and indeed isolated from mainstream society. This jeopardizes their mental health and prevents autistic people from developing to full potential. The situation is not only problematical for the development of autistic people but is also to the detriment of wider society, in so far as autistic people are effectively prevented from contributing fully. This account assumes that some (not necessarily all) autistic people yearn to be included, to be productive and to be useful. It thus directly opposes accounts that view autism as an extreme case of diminished social motivation.     

Emotional scenes elicit more pronounced self-reported emotional experience and greater EPN and LPP modulation when compared to emotional faces

Emotional faces and scenes carry a wealth of overlapping and distinct perceptual information. Despite widespread use in the investigation of emotional perception, expressive face and evocative scene stimuli are rarely assessed in the same experiment. Here, we evaluated self-reports of arousal and pleasantness, as well as early and late event-related potentials (e.g., N170, early posterior negativity [EPN], late positive potential [LPP]) as subjects viewed neutral and emotional faces and scenes, including contents representing anger, fear, and joy. Results demonstrate that emotional scenes were rated as more evocative than emotional faces, as only scenes produced elevated self-reports of arousal. In addition, viewing scenes resulted in more extreme ratings of pleasantness (and unpleasantness) than did faces. EEG results indicate that both expressive faces and emotional scenes evoke enhanced negativity in the N170 component, while the EPN and LPP components show significantly enhanced modulation only by scene, relative to face stimuli. These data suggest that viewing emotional scenes results in a more pronounced emotional experience that is associated with reliable modulation of visual event-related potentials that are implicated in emotional circuits in the brain.     

PiSCES: Pictures with social context and emotional scenes with norms for emotional valence,intensity, and social engagement

Picture databases are commonly used in experimental work on various aspects of emotion processing. However, existing standardized facial databases, typically used to explore emotion recognition, can be augmented with more contextual information for studying emotion and social perception. Moreover, the perception of social engagement, i.e., the degree of interaction or engagement inferred between the people in target pictures, has not been measured. In this paper, we describe the development of a database comprising 203 black-and-white line drawings depicting people within various situational contexts, and normed on perceived emotional valence, intensity, and social engagement, a new construct. Analyses of ratings collected from 62 young adults (30 females, 32 males; mean age 22 years) revealed the typical quadratic relationship between valence and intensity, i.e., stimuli that are more emotionally charged, whether positively or negatively valenced, are more intense than emotionally-neutral stimuli. Moreover, the results showed significant linear and quadratic relationships between valence and social engagement ratings, indicating that emotionally-charged social scenes were perceived as more engaging than emotionally-neutral social scenes. This new database will facilitate investigations of how people perceive and interpret social and emotional information in everyday interactions, and is offered as a resource to experimenters involved in social and/or emotional processing research.     

How generative drawing affects the learning process: An eye‐tracking analysis

Generative drawing is a learning strategy in which students draw illustrations while reading a text to depict the content of the lesson. In two experiments, students were asked to generate drawings as they read a scientific text or read the same text on influenza with author‐provided illustrations (Experiment 1) or to generate drawings or write verbal summaries as they read (Experiment 2). An examination of students' eye movements during learning showed that students who engaged in generative drawing displayed more rereadings of words, higher proportion of fixations on the important words, higher rate of transitions between words and workspace, and higher proportion of transitions between important words and workspace than students given a text lesson with author‐generated illustrations (Experiment 1) or students who were asked to write a summary (Experiment 2). These findings contribute new evidence to guide theories for explaining how generative drawing affects learning processes.     

利用绘画区分自闭症谱系障碍儿童功能的探索

根据儿童绘画发展理论,通过对160名3.2～14岁自闭症谱系障碍儿童的“自由画”、“绘人”和“家庭成员画”的赋值编码以及与普通儿童绘画的对比,从量与质的角度,分析和探索了绘画在区分自闭症谱系障碍儿童功能的可行性。     

Using the ADI-R to diagnose autism in preschool children

The use of an investigator-based interview (Autism Diagnostic Interview—Revised; ADI-R) in the diagnosis of 51 autistic and 43 nonautistic mentally handicapped preschool children of equivalent mental and chronological age is described. Significant differences occurred between the groups on every diagnostic subdomain from the DSM-IV/ICD-10 draft criteria, except specific aspects of stereotyped language, still relatively rare in these young children. All but one of the 51 children judged to be autistic by clinical observation and only two of the 30 nonautistic mentally handicapped children with mental ages of 18 months or higher met criteria for autism on an algorithm to DSM-IV/ICD-10 draft criteria. However, discrimination using domain totals between autistic and the 13 nonautistic, nonverbal mentally handicapped children with mental ages under 18 months was poor. Quality of social overtures to adults and peers, play, and unusual sensory behaviors and mannerisms continued to differentiate these two groups. The relevance of these findings to the diagnosis of autism in preschool children is discussed.     

Moral reasoning in autistic individuals: a theoretical review / El razonamiento moral en personas con Trastorno del Espectro Autista: una revisión teórica

Abstract

Individuals diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often find it difficult to attribute mental states to others and to understand their own and others’ behaviour (Theory of Mind, [ToM]/social cognition). These difficulties can affect their moral judgements. The present article focuses on evidence on moral reasoning and ToM, with the aim of analysing theoretical and review research into autism. The weight intention has in moral reasoning and the causal relation between mental states, actions and outcomes is an essential part of this study. Evidence in the field of autism reports how autistic people would not be able to make moral judgements based on the agent’s intention. Instead, they would reason based on the outcomes of the action. For example, this can be translated into misunderstandings, malicious judgements or ‘over-blaming’ in accidental situations (ambiguous valences). These impairments can confirm the association between ToM and moral reasoning.     

Children's Creative Intentions: Where do the Ideas for their Drawings Come from?

The process of drawing is a creative endeavor, often beginning with ideas of what to draw. This exploratory study aimed to explore these creative intentions of pupils from mainstream schools (tending to focus on observational, imaginative, and expressive drawing), and from Steiner schools (tending to focus on imagination and expression). Fifty-seven children (age 6–16 years) drew a single drawing at the request of the researcher. Before and after drawing, children completed a semi-structured interview about the content of their drawing. This interview was first analyzed qualitatively using thematic analysis to describe where children got the ideas for their drawings from. Four key themes were identified: (a) content from immediate surroundings, (b) content from memory, (c) representational content with element of imagination added, and (d) intention to express a mood or message. Content analysis was then used to quantify the interview responses and compare them between the school types. This indicated no difference in the frequency that mainstream and Steiner pupils referred to ideas based on real-world referents or imagination. However, Steiner pupils talked more about expressive ideas. The results suggest that children use a wide range of sources when generating ideas of what to draw, including their educational experiences.     

Motor proficiency and emotional/behavioural disturbance in autism and Asperger's disorder: another piece of the neurological puzzle?

The relationship of motor proficiency with emotional/behavioural disturbance, autistic symptoms and communication disturbance was investigated in children diagnosed with autism and Asperger's disorder (AD). The Movement Assessment Battery for Children was used as a measure of motor impairment, and the Developmental Behavioural Checklist was used as a measure of emotional/behavioural disturbance in the following groups: AD (n?=?22), high functioning autism (HFA) (n?=?23), LFA (n?=?8) and typically developing children (n?=?20). The HFA group had more difficulty with motor items, such as ball skills and balance, than did the AD group. There were significant positive correlations between impairments in motor proficiency (in particular ball skills and balance) and emotional/behavioural disturbance, autistic symptoms and communication disturbance. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that there are qualitative and quantitative differences in the motor profile between autism and AD. In addition, the association between motor proficiency impairment and emotional/behavioural disturbance in autism and AD emphasizes the importance for screening of co-occurring emotional/behavioural symptoms in individuals with motor difficulties. These findings have implications for the potential use of adjunct motor measures in the diagnosis and definition of autism spectrum disorders.     

On the relationship between children's perspective taking in complex scenes and their spatial drawing ability

Depicting space and volume in drawings is challenging for young children in particular. It has been assumed that several cognitive skills may contribute to children's drawing. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between perspective‐taking skills in complex scenes and the spatial characteristics in drawings of 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds (N= 121). Perspective taking was assessed by two tasks: (a) a visual task similar to the three‐mountains task, in which the children had to select a three‐dimensional model that showed the view on a scene from particular perspective and (b) a spatial construction task, in which children had to plastically reconstruct a three‐dimensional scene as it would appear from a new point of view. In the drawing task, the children were asked to depict a three‐dimensional scene exactly as it looked like from their own point of view. Several spatial features in the drawings were coded. The results suggested that children's spatial drawing and their perspective‐taking skills were related. The axes system and the spatial relations between objects in the drawings in particular were predicted, beyond age, by certain measures of the two perspective‐taking tasks. The results are discussed in the light of particular demands that might underlay both perspective taking and spatial drawing.     

Political skill and emotional cue learning via voices: a training study

The ability to discern emotional expressive cues represents an important interpersonal emotional skill at the workplace. In a training study with 123 employee–peer dyads, we examined whether political skill enhances the learning of emotional expressive cues via voices. Controlling for the effects of extraversion and self‐monitoring, it was found that political skill was significantly related to the accurate recognition of emotions via voices after a training session. As predicted, other‐reported political skill was found to be a stronger predictor of such learning than self‐reported political skill. In addition, social astuteness and networking ability were the most predictive of emotional cue learning among the different dimensions of political skill. Implications and limitations are discussed.