Expressive drawing ability in children with autism

Abstract

The autistic impairments in emotional and social competence, imagination and generating ideas predict qualitative differences in expressive drawings by children with autism beyond that accounted by any general learning difficulties. In a sample of 60 5-19-year-olds, happy and sad drawings were requested from 15 participants with non-savant autism and compared with those drawn by three control groups matched on either degree of learning difficulty (MLD), mental age (MA) or chronological age (CA). All drawings were rated by two artists on a 7-point quality of expression scale. Contrary to our predictions, the drawings from the autistic group were rated similar to those of the MA and MLD groups. Analysis of the people and social content of the drawings revealed that although children with autism did not draw fewer people, they did draw more immature forms than mental age controls. Furthermore, there was tentative evidence that fewer social scenes were produced by the autism sample. We conclude that the overall merit of expressive drawing in autism is commensurate with their general learning difficulties, but the social/emotional impairment in autism affects their drawings of people and social scenes.

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

“…The raters worked independently and were blind to the age and gender of the drawers. This scoring method in which raters make their judgements being aware of the depicted emotions is commonly used to similar studies (Bonoti & Misailidi, 2006;Brechet, 2013;Brechet & Jolley, 2014;Jolley, O'Kelly, Barlow, & Jarrold, 2013;Jolley et al, 2004). Reliability between raters was assessed by calculating the intraclass correlation (ICC; Shrout & Fleiss, 1979).…”

Correlations between the Drawing Process in Autistic Children and Developmental Indexes

“…This observation is supported by the fact that also those children with autism spectrum disorder with have an appropriate intellectual level show delays in drawings [14]. Children with autistic disorder showed, in fact, many difficulties to express and give shape to their emotional state because of an affective attunement deficit that interfered on both verbal and non-verbal behaviors such as drawing [15,16]. The drawing productions of these children were affected by the marked decrease in social integration and communication.…”

Sketching to Remember: Episodic Free Recall Task Support for Child Witnesses and Victims with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…ASD is characterized by an atypical interest in inanimate objects, and children with ASD tend to prefer pictures of inanimate objects (Celani, 2002). Moreover, drawings produced by children with ASD are generally different from typically developing children (e.g., Jolley, O'Kelly, Barlow & Jarrold, 2013;Lee & Hobson, 2006). We did not analyse quality, but in terms of quantity and type of items drawn, the drawings produced did not differ as the literature might predict.…”