Size, Detail, and Line Heaviness in Children's Drawings as Correlates of Emotional Distress: (More) Negative Evidence

This study examined the reliability and validity of three commonly used indicators of emotional distress in children's projective drawings--size, detail, and line heaviness--and assessed their relation to established objective and projective measures of childhood depression and anxiety. Participants were 80 child and adolescent psychiatric inpatients (53 boys, 27 girls; ages 6 to 16; M = 10.69, SD = 2.94). Although the present results indicated that these drawing indices can be assessed with very high reliability, they were not significantly associated with self-report or thematic projective measures of depression and anxiety. Age and defensiveness did not moderate the relation between the drawing indices and the non-drawing measures of emotional distress. The patterning of the intercorrelations among and within the drawing indices, projective stories, and self-report measures indicated greater support for the self-report measures, in terms of convergent and discriminant validity. This study did not support the continued use of these three projective drawing indices of emotional distress.