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

argued that the procedure of taking the mean of several paintings might have simply
produced a neutral score from wildly different paintings. Three points refute this: (i) the
scale point in the middle and with the widest interval was 3(25-55%), whereas scores for
space centred on 2 (10-25%); (ii) the confidence intervals are very small indicating very
little variation within groups; and the ANOVA between paintings showed no significant
differences between paintings (Results section).
Differences between groups - Emotional Tone
Comparison with other studies is difficult here because it is assumed that the content is
decodable and assumptions about the meanings of what is portrayed form the basis of
most studies. Generally the patient picture is expected to score much lower: to distort
proportion, perspective and to show more negative content than the control 328 ; there are
said to be reflections of thought disorder in schizophrenia, hopelessness and despair in
depression 329 . Although the DAPA results agree with the general tone of the literature,
that controls score higher than patients, there was a narrower band of variation than this
literature suggests. All patient scores hovered around neutral and there were no
correlations with other variables, suggesting that structure and colour had no separable
328 Distinguishing features of psychotic art reported in the literature, collected by Wadeson (1980), op.cit.
p.190 although she does not endorse all of these characteristics, especially that disorganised behaviour
reflects in the drawings. She does note that hopelessness and emptiness, enclosed trapped feelings
predominate in the themes of depressed patients' paintings; Amos (1982), op.cit., in a synthesis of the
1960s and 1970s literature suggests content reflects the schizophrenic's world view of unusual or
maladaptive experiences, impaired reality sense, no baseline reference, disconnected and bizarre images,
especially human, heavy line emphasis, and words, disintegrated composition without regard for
perspective, primitive style and inappropriate or uncontrollable use of colour.
329 Shoemaker (1978 op.cit.) provides a sensitive 'guidelist' of how to examine a painting by a patient for
visually available dimensions 'within which the specific definitions of psychopathology may fall, as a step
towards measurement'; she suggests: synthessence, space, substance, time, energy, relativity, reflection
of perception and expression.
299