“This Is My Family”

Abstract

In the present study, we examined the family drawings of preschool-aged children from three cultural contexts that represented different aspects of autonomy and relatedness. The final sample consisted of 53 children from urban Western middle-class families from Osnabrueck, Germany; 63 children from rural Cameroonian Nso farming families; and 59 children from urban middle-class families from Ankara, Turkey. The children were of similar age and did not differ in basic drawing abilities. The family drawings varied with cultural context and the respective orientation toward autonomy and relatedness, specifically in regard to the number and position of family members, the depicted absolute and relative size of family members, the details of facial features, and the emotional expression. Additionally, the positioning and spatial arrangement of family members on the paper can be linked to the children’s familiarity with external frames of reference in drawings.

Cultural perspectives on children’s tadpole drawings: at the interface between representation and production

“…Tadpole drawers from Western and non-Western urban educated contexts depicted significantly more facial details than did children from non-Western rural traditional contexts, irrespective of the head size. Even though the present effect is only of medium size, the result is consistent with a former study about facial details of conventional drawers in these ecosocial contexts (Gernhardt et al, 2013). Besides, children’s age revealed to be another factor influencing the depiction of facial details, though this effect is also of medium size.…”

“…In particular, tadpole self-drawings from children living in Western urban educated contexts are expected to (1) be taller, (2) contain more facial features, and (3) more often include smiling facial expressions as compared to tadpole depictions from non-Western rural contexts. With respect to tadpole self-drawings from children living in non-Western urban educated contexts, mean figure sizes, number of facial details, and the proportion of smiling facial expression are expected to be similar to those from children living in Western urban educated contexts, as has been observed before in conventional human figure drawings (Gernhardt et al, 2013). We further expect that drawing features do not differ significantly between cultural groups that share the same ecosocial context.…”

“…Thus, in line with the cultural variability of emotional expressions and responses (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Matsumoto, 1991; Tsai et al, 2006; Mesquita, 2007), differences have been observed in children’s depiction of the mouth in more elaborated self-drawings (La Voy et al, 2001; Gernhardt et al, 2013, 2014b). Likewise, variability in the number of depicted facial features across cultures has been explained by differences in children’s early interactional experiences.…”

“…Socialization is described as manifesting the pattern of autonomous relatedness (Tulviste et al, 2007; Tougu et al, 2011; Tulviste, 2013). Comparable results were obtained for urban Turkish mothers (Gernhardt et al, 2013) and urban Costa Rican parents (Keller et al, 2006). …”

Examining cultural drifts in artworks through history and development: cultural comparisons between Japanese and western landscape paintings and drawings

“…Generally, these findings have demonstrated that cognitive differences between cultures emerge in early elementary school (Duffy et al, 2009; Kuwabara et al, 2011; Kuwabara and Smith, 2012; Imada et al, 2013), and through interaction with their children, caregivers convey culturally important messages, which may be the bases of culturally specific patterns of attention (Fernald and Morikawa, 1993; Senzaki et al, 2014c). Research on culture and aesthetics in a developmental context has also demonstrated that aesthetic expressions are systematically different across cultures (Rübeling et al, 2011; Gernhardt et al, 2013; Ishii et al, 2014). In line with these findings, Senzaki et al (2014b) examined cultural variations in landscape artworks produced by primary school children in Japan and Canada, and demonstrated that once children understood the concept of a horizon (age 8 for both cultures), Japanese children drew the horizon higher in both studies and integrated more objects in their collages than did Canadian, the pattern of which is consistent with that of young adult data (Masuda et al, 2008c).…”