Size and emotion or depth and emotion? Evidence, using Matryoshka (Russian) dolls, of children using physical depth as a proxy for emotional charge

Background: The size and emotion effect is the tendency for children to draw people and other objects with a positive emotional charge larger than those with a negative or neutral charge. Here we explored the novel idea that drawing size might be acting as a proxy for depth (proximity).Methods: Forty-two children (aged 3-11 years) chose, from 2 sets of Matryoshka (Russian) dolls, a doll to represent a person with positive, negative or neutral charge, which they placed in front of themselves on a sheet of A3 paper. Results: We found that the children used proximity and doll size, to indicate emotional charge. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with the notion that in drawings, children are using size as a proxy for physical closeness (proximity), as they attempt with varying success to put positive charged items closer to, or negative and neutral charge items further away from, themselves

The effect of affective characterizations on the use of size and colour in drawings produced by children in the absence of a model

Previous studies have revealed that children increase the size of drawings of topics about which they feel positively and use their most preferred colours for colouring in these drawings, and decrease the size of topics about which they feel negatively and use their least preferred colours for colouring in these drawings. However, these previous findings have been obtained in studies employing drawing tasks where planning and production difficulties have been minimised by asking the children either to copy or to colour in an outline stimulus of a figure provided by the experimenter. The present experiment was designed to examine whether children also alter the use of size and colour in their drawings in response to emotional characterisations when they are not constrained by the presence of a model. Two hundred and fifty three children aged between 4 and 11 years were asked to produce drawings of a neutrally, a positively and a negatively characterised topic (either a man, a dog or a tree). It was found that the children consistently increased the size of the positively characterised figures, did not consistently decrease the size of the negatively characterised figures, used their most preferred colours for the positive figures, and used their least preferred colours for the negative figures. These findings are discussed in relation to the operation of an appetitive-defensive mechanism and pictorial conventions