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

much less in study 1, but the sample were mostly outpatients using varied substances in
a recovery state, whereas for study 2, they were inpatients, more homogenously alcoholic
and mostly in an acute state. This different group explanation does cover the
possibilities, an alternative could have been that content influenced work, but this is
unlikely because the controls who worked in the same surroundings at the same time
remained constant. These results support the explanation of differences between groups
for study 2 (at the beginning of this chapter) suggesting that substance abusers may
communicate more subjective unhappiness through their work than other groups.
Emotive tone should certainly be affected by content and differences were
expected between studies 1 (fixed content) and 2 (free content). All groups were slightly
negative in study 1, with no significant differences; in study 2, all groups were slightly
positive except substance abusers, whose pictures contained more large quantities of
black, but whose rating remained stable but relatively lower than other patients.
Schizophrenics increased their score only slightly, but the pictures of depressives and
controls were both more positive. The only thing that changed in free content was that
controls were differentiated as more positive than all patients.
Summary: Generally, trends from study 1 were followed in study 2, and mostly, groups
remained surprisingly constant in their use of colour and structure in their pictures, with
one or two exceptions from particular groups. However, fluctuations due to changes in
the painting generation procedure, the sharper definition of the patient groups and greater
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