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

influence on apparent negativity. Where precedents for the DAPA results exist, they
used systematic methods 330 and it is not certain that previous studies have taken the
effect of quality judgements into consideration 331 , even though the justification for
selection of features may be theoretically remote.
A probable explanation for these findings lies in the test procedure. Other studies
may have placed increased emphasis on negative indicators thus influencing the view of
the whole painting as negative, whereas corresponding or small positive parts are ignored.
The DAPA scores tell us that no group consistently produced negative indicators over
the whole picture surface. Where negative scores were given, they must have been
balanced by positive scores, because of the centring on neutral. The confidence intervals
were very short in the groups most expected to produce negative paintings: schizophrenia
and depression, indicating little variability within group and we know that the sequence
of paintings did not show fluctuations from negative to positive 332 .
330
Russell-Lacy et al. (1979 op.cit.) found differences isolating schizophrenics from both controls and other
patients in repetitions of abstract forms (mannerism) only, between patients and controls only in these
form variables: imbalance, detail, two dimensions and space covered between patients and controls. There
were no differences in relationship of imagery, focal points, monochromism, perspective, words or
portrayed houses in the picture; Wadeson (1980, op.cit.) warns that casual observation alone revealed no
particular patterns of content in diagnostic groups; E.L. Phillips, S.K. Geller and M. Ireland (1983),
Research on the use of art therapy in a university setting, Am. J. Art Therapy , V.23(1):26-9 were unable
to assess whether themes in artwork were sequential.
331
examples of previous studies finding no relationship in thematic content after quality judgements were
accounted for have been; R. Langevin and L.M. Hutchins (1973), An experimental investigation of judges'
ratings of schizophrenics and non-schizophrenics paintings, J. Personality Assessment , V.37(6):537-543,
results from 13 judges ratings of 200 paintings as schizophrenic/normal were only 10% greater than chance
using their own criteria which was subsequently found to be art quality; E. Feher, L. Vandicreek, H.
Taglasi (1983), The problem of art quality in the use of human figure drawings, J. Clinical Psychology ,
V.39(2):268-275, although 8 from 16 judges were warned on quality, all returned a 58% hit rate on
quality.
332 Different paintings by individuals were compared by analysis of variance (see results section) in order
to determine the propriety of taking the mean value for each subject, results were non-significant.
300