Fotini Bonoti

Children's Bullying Experiences Expressed through Drawings and Self-Reports.

Traditionally, studies assessing children’s experiences of bullying and victimization have focused on the use of questionnaires and peer-nominations. The present study aimed to investigate this phenomenon by using two complementary assessment tools, namely self-reported questionnaires and children’s drawings. The sample consisted of 448 boys and girls drawn from the 4th to 6th grade classrooms of ten primary schools in Central Greece. Children were asked to: (a) draw a scene of peer victimization taking place in their school and (b) complete self-reported questionnaires regarding bullying behaviour, victimization and participant roles in bully/victim incidences. Although the results showed that the relation between drawing and self-report measures is not a straightforward one, they do reveal some interesting associations primarily related to gender differences. In other words, it was found that boys outnumbered girls in both bullying behaviour and victimization. Regarding the employed forms of victimization, boys tended to depict themselves in more physical aggression scenes than girls, while girls tended to draw themselves in more verbal victimization scenes than boys.

Exploring Children's Understanding of Death: Through Drawings and the Death Concept Questionnaire

To investigate whether childrens understanding of the concept of death varies as a function of death experience and age, 52 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years (26 had a personal death experience), drew a picture reflecting the meaning of the word death and completed the Death Concept Questionnaire for examination of Human and Animal Death. The results showed that the 2 methodological tools used offered complementary information and that childrens understanding of death is related both to age and past experience. Children with death experience seem to have a more realistic understanding of death than their inexperienced age-mates. As regards to the effect of age, our findings support the assumption that the different components of death develop through different processes.

Writing and Drawing Performance of School Age Children Is There Any Relationship

The aim of our study was to investigate possible relationships between writing and drawing performance of school-aged children, in order to compare the two skills at the within-individual level. The sample consisted of 182 right- and left-handed children, aged 8 to 12 years. Children were examined by the Greek adaptation of the Luria-Nebraska neuropsychological battery in spontaneous writing, copying and writing to dictation and they were asked to complete four different drawing tasks. The results produced significant correlations between drawing scores and scores in all three writing tasks. Significant differences in drawing performance among proficient and poor hand writers were also found. On the other hand, there were no significant differences between right- and left-handers’ performance on the above tasks, despite the overrepresentation of left-handed amongst between poor writers. Our findings create a fruitful ground for the further study of early drawing as a means to predict later handwriting problems.

Drawing Performance in Children with Special Learning Difficulties

The present study examined drawings on 5 tasks of 45 dyslexic and 45 nondyslexic children aged 6–9 years old. Children who show low performance in written language and phonological awareness are also expected to get low scores on drawing tasks which require similar skills such as comprehension of difference, coordination of parts in an organized whole, spatial movement, classification or distinction of figures. The present hypotheses were constructed accordingly. Analysis showed that the drawings of the dyslexic participants presented inadequate planning, difficulties in the depiction of contrast, size-scaling and canonicality, lack of details, and stereotypic depiction.

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 childrens drawings, closely followed by sadness. The results also showed a linear increase in ratings of emotional expressiveness with age.

emotion in children's art do young children understand the emotions expressed in other children's drawings?

This study examined developmental changes in childrens ability to understand the emotions expressed in other childrens drawings. Eighty participants, at each of four age groups — three, four, five and six years — were presented with a series of child drawings, each expressing a different emotion (happiness, sadness, anger or fear). All drawings had been previously rated by adult judges on an emotion-intensity scale as being good exemplars of the emotions examined. Next, participants were shown pictures of child artists each expressing one of the designated emotions on her/his face and were instructed to identify the artist who created each drawing. The results showed that: (i) by age three, children demonstrated an understanding of the emotions expressed in drawings; (ii) happiness, sadness and fear were the emotions most easily recognized by participants. Overall, these results provide support for the assertion that the ability to understand the emotional meaning of drawings is present from the preschool years.

Explaining age and sex differences in children's handwriting: A neurobiological approach

The present study aimed to assess the effect of age and sex on childrens writing performance, as well as to investigate possible age and sex differences between proficient, intermediate and poor writers. Two hundred and ten children aged 7 to 12 years were examined during spontaneous writing, copying and writing to dictation, using the writing scale of the Luria – Nebraska neuropsychological battery. Results showed a significant effect of age in writing performance. The trend towards writing proficiency in childhood was found to be sex related, while boys were overrepresented among the poor writers. The findings are interpreted on the basis of the neurobiological theories of brain development as well as on the different rates of cerebral maturation between the sexes.

Representations of loneliness in children’s drawings

This article reports the results of a study which aimed to examine the development of children’s ability to depict loneliness in their drawings. Seventy-eight children and 20 adults took part in the study. Participants were first asked a series of questions assessing their conceptions of loneliness, and were then invited to draw a picture that conveys loneliness. The resulting drawings were coded and scored for the presence of the two dimensions of loneliness: cognitive and emotional. First, the authors examined the use by participants of graphic indicators denoting deficiencies in one’s social relations resulting to loneliness (cognitive dimension); second, they assessed the expressive strategies participants employed to convey the negative affect that typically accompanies loneliness in their drawings (emotional dimension). Finally, the authors tested the relationship between children’s definitions of loneliness with their drawings of the construct. The results show a clear developmental progression in children’s pictorial representations of loneliness. Whereas the majority of young children represented loneliness as the absence of a social network, older children used graphic indicators to convey both the absence of a social network and the sadness that accompanies loneliness. In contrast to children, adults consistently included symbolic or metaphoric graphic indicators in their drawings to convey the negative affect accompanying the experience of loneliness.

Children’s perceptions of illness and health: An analysis of drawings

Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore possible age differences in children’s perceptions of illness and health and to what extent these differ from adults’ perceptions. Design: Cross-sectional design. Setting: Selected nursery and primary schools in Greece. Method: The sample consisted of 347 children aged 5–11 years and 114 adults – as a comparison group. Each participant was asked to create two drawings, depicting illness and health respectively, and to give an explanatory title for each. Drawings were categorised into three main categories, depending on the aspect of illness or health depicted, namely biomedical, psychosocial and lifestyle. Results: Older children produced more multifaceted depictions of illness and health than their younger counterparts, while the youngest group had difficulty to represent the two concepts clearly. A comparison of children’s perception of illness and health revealed that the first is perceived mainly as a biomedical phenomenon, while the latter as a psychosocial one. Finally, a comparison of adults’ and children’s representations showed that children understand illness mainly through its biomedical dimensions, unlike adults who seem to prefer to stress psychosocial ones. Conclusions: Knowledge of children’s subjective perceptions of illness and health may be useful in designing health prevention programmes and for medical professionals working with children experiencing chronic illness.

Children's expressive drawing strategies: the effects of mood, age and topic

The study aimed to investigate whether the impact of mood state on childrens choice of expressive strategies (literal and non-literal content and abstract) varies as a function of mood valence, age and topic to be drawn. The sample (N = 96) consisted of four groups of children aged 5, 7, 9 and 11years, respectively. Half of the children in each age group were induced with a positive mood state and the other half with a negative mood state. Following mood induction, children were asked to draw one of two topics, an animate (person) or an inanimate one (tree). The results showed that: (a) happiness and sadness activated similar expressive drawing strategies; (b) from the age of five years onwards children were able to use both literal and non-literal expressive strategies in their drawings; (c) non-literal content strategies were used more frequently compared to abstract ones by all age groups; and (d) topic had an effect on the choice of expressive strategies: children used more literal strategies for the depiction of the person and more non-literal ones for the depiction of the tree. The implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.