Leah Moyer
12/11/19
PSYC 202
COLL Paper 1
In the article I chose, the issue addressed by the study explored the relationship between
attachment style in children and the art they produced of themselves and their families. The
study’s main goal was to confirm that analyzing “family drawings” as a measure of
security/insecurity in children is a valid indicative instrument of attachment style. The
experimenters asked the children to create a “drawing of a family”, i.e. a portrait of themselves
and their attachment figures, which is how most interpreted the question. They reasoned that
certain stylistic elements, content, level of detail, and more in their art may correlate with such
attachment that they also tested alongside the drawing prompt.
The researchers divided 117 kids between the ages of 6 and 10 (living in Milan, Italy of
similar socioeconomic backgrounds) into 3 groups of 39 children each, homogenously organized
by their attachment styles: secure, anxious-ambivalent insecure, and avoidant insecure (there
were not enough children displaying “disorganized attachment” to include this subgroup). To
determine which attachment style the children possessed, they employed the standardized
Separation Anxiety Test (SAT). I thought the use of a more modern test was rather clever, as the
researchers describe employing a significantly shorter study that was created in the past by
psychologists to efficiently determine children’s attachment styles. The method is much more of
an accessible experiment, using pictographic images depicting scenarios rather than reenacting
the scenario with each child and their parent, which certainly saves a good deal of time, effort,
and emotional vulnerability on the part of the subjects.
The way the children’s subsequent drawings were then analyzed empirically was based
on “the coding system of Kaplan and Main”, further expounded upon by “Fury, Carlson, and
Sroufe”. Three levels of coding were applied to the drawings. The first measured “graphic,
formal, and content” aspects of the drawings involving an “ad hoc grid comprising 35 nominally
scored items grouped into five categories.” The second analysis evaluated the drawings based on
“eight 5-point global rating scales.” Finally, the third category rated “overall characteristics of
the representation” (referencing the presence of bizarre content, overall creativity, and care taken
in the drawing’s execution). The overall analysis indeed confirmed there were significant
differences between the drawings created by children with different attachment styles, and
similarities between the children that subsequently shared attachment styles.
The basis upon how they judged the drawings was to me, fascinating. The graphics
included in the article expound upon what specific criteria was used to sort the work
symbolically. Something very interesting is that a tipoff a child had secure attachment was their
attention to gender roles. It was stated that securely attached children showed “well-individuated,
gender- differentiated” persons, and that “mother figures were depicted as feminine.” On the
other hand, insecurely attached kids “were more likely to draw poorly individuated and poorly
gender-differentiated figures” (as well as other markers such as omitted body parts, inappropriate
space or lack of space between figures, and less attention to detail). Something that around half
of people learn, either consciously or unconsciously as they grow older, is that perceptions of
gender, sex, race, etc. as it pertains to the individual are not so clear cut. Oftentimes notions of
gender in particular is redundant, nonsensical, and more often than not a symbolic gesture than
anything pertaining to a universal standard/truth. So why is it that when children are younger is it
almost necessary, and in fact healthy for kids to set these simplistic stereotypes?
My guess is that these symbols of people, of self and other, are necessary to early
development as they help a child adjust comfortably to the world around them. Without these
certain basic identifiers, no child would be able to feel psychologically “secure”. The
experimental methodology of interpreting the inner workings of one’s mind as translated to
paper certainly reminds me of certain methods of psychoanalysis we studied in class. Freud’s
ideas on the unconscious as well as the Rorschach test seem particularly relevant, although these
theories have been more often than not applied to adults. The significant difference that can be
made here is adults are generally warier about the way they are seen, the things they create, and
of course are more aware of the ways in which their external output could be interpreted by
others as compared to kids. Thus, the simple yet versatile idea of turning children’s drawings
(devoid of self-conscious ulterior motive) into data on their inner psychology is brilliant.
Since they confirmed there is indeed a correlation that can be made between the two, the
conclusion that an analysis of a family drawing done by a child can be used to facilitate early
intervention at signs of attachment/adjustment issues in childhood is valid. That being said, this
study is a correlational study rather than a “true experiment”. In a true experiment the researcher
perfectly manipulates one variable to measure its effect on another, but since this study has a
variable that would be unethical to manipulate (a child’s form of attachment based on the way
their parent/s raise them), correlational is the only way this can be studied. The experiment was
helpful nonetheless even if the science could be seen as minorly subjective based on the uniform
nature of the population studied and the methods used. Even so, the strong correlation is
significant to psychology and particularly childcare; if the warning signs of an insecure
attachment can be recognized earlier on by psychologists and even parents, then there’s the
possibility they do not become bigger problems to the child’s quality of life later in adulthood.
References:
Procaccia, R., Veronese, G., & Castiglioni, M. (2014). The impact of attachment style on the
family drawings of school-aged children. The Open Psychology Journal, 7, Article 917. https://doi-org.proxy.wm.edu/10.2174/1874350101407010009