Croatian children's experience of war is not reflected in the size and placement of emotive topics in their drawings.
The claim that topics in children's drawings convey the children's emotional attitude towards those topics was investigated.



The influence of an emotional topic (neutral man, friendly and enemy soldier) and trauma group (child with father or father killed in war) was examined on the size of the topics and their placement relative to a self-portrait drawing.



Sixty Croatian children drew a man, followed on a separate page by either (a) a Croatian soldier, (b) an enemy soldier or (c) a second drawing of a man. The child's self-portrait drawing was placed on each page.



There were no significant main or interaction effects on size or placement of topic.



There are unlikely to be reliable features of drawings that portray the child's emotional attitude towards the topic drawn.
Jolley
R P
RP
Division of Psychology, School of Sciences, Staffordshire University, College Road, Stoke-on-Trent ST4 2DE, UK. r.p.jolley@staffs.ac.uk
Vulic-Prtoric
A
A
D001290:Attitude; D002648:Child; D017523:Croatia; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011386:Projective Techniques; D014857:Warfare