The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

drawings by sex abused adolescents (57). Although no test was applied, trauma
indicators from drawings of trees with damages found that psychotics drew more broken
limbs or damaged trunks than normal controls (52).
Summary: emotional indicators became reliable when judged objectively on specific
graphic features. Certain features may discriminate drawings of depressed or psychotic
patients from normal controls, but they were not apparent in victims of sexual abuse, the
expected client group which is most frequently exposed to this kind of measure. Studies
9 and 10 reported most of their variables were 'statistically but not clinically significant'
for drawings from victims of sexual abuse, i.e. they were rare in that group. This finding
is consistent with the recent literature 190 ; most studies failed to establish sex markers and
presence of genitalia were rare.
Quality
Reliability: 6 experimental studies and 1 study of validity between tests generated 15
variables, which were grouped among 2 subjective subcategories of content appraisal and
1 formal subcategory. All the tests for agreement were the same, so studies compared
well. Reliable subcategories were: presence of specific elements of drawing sophistication
(38, 35, 61, 31), and proportion of the image, in parts (38) and overall (35, 38, 36, 20).
190
Comprehensively summarised by M.M. Trowbridge (1995) Graphic indicators of sexual abuse in
children's drawings: a review of the literature, Arts in Psychotherapy , V.22(5):485-93.
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