Typical emotional expression in children’s drawings of the human face

This study was aimed at verifying if children introduce emotional expressions in their drawings of human faces, and if a preferential expression exists; we also wanted to verify if children’s pictorial choices change with increasing age. To this end we examined the human figure drawings made by 160 boys and 160 girls, equally divided in 4 age groups: 6–7; 8–9; 10–11; 12–13 years; mean ages (SD in parentheses) were: 83,30 (6,54); 106,14 (7,16) 130,49 (8,26); 155,40 (6,66). Drawings were collected with the Draw-a-Man test instructions, i.e. without mentioning an emotional characterization. In the light of data from previous studies of emotion drawing on request, and the literature about preferred emotional expressions, we expected that an emotion would be portrayed even by the younger participants, and that the preferred emotion would be happiness. We also expected that with the improving ability to keep into account both mouth and eyes appearance, other expressions would be found besides the smiling face. Data were submitted to non-parametric tests to compare the frequencies of expressions (absolute and by age) and the frequencies of visual cues (absolute and by age and expressions). The results confirmed that only a small number of faces were expressionless, and that the most frequent emotion was happiness. However, with increasing age this representation gave way to a variety of basic emotions (sadness, fear, anger, surprise), whose representation may depend from the ability to modify the shapes of both eyes and mouth and changing communicative aims of the child.