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

the features of psychopathology. This finding, and the fact that some traditional
gradations of drawing features were ineffective as discriminators opens up a whole new
area of primary exploration in both formal and content evaluation.
Is the DAPA better than other art assessments?
The question whether the DAPA is better than other art assessments is meaningless.
Previous assessment methods have tried to do two jobs: to provide a standardised format
for art therapy approaches, and also to provide immediate accessible lists of
characteristics from an individual picture for the art therapist. The DAPA assessment
requires much processing and is not suitable for these purposes. No immediate
impression can be gained from its indices. However, no other published art assessment,
to my knowledge, provides a replicable, reliable and effective discrimination between
patient groups. Effect size comparison between patients and controls places the DAPA
far above the rest of the field. The majority of other tests assess content as a whole and
then relative to parts; the other apparent structural indexes are hardly mentioned,
although they are commented on qualitatively. The DAPA results show that the raw
data for a simplified objective measure of content (emotional tone) only just satisfied the
assumptions for ANOVA and the energy-focus of the picture (form) did not satisfy the
criteria. Simplified statistics therefore are not appropriate for these measures and as far
as I know, none have taken account of distribution bias or of correlations between the
variables. This problem of multicollinearity, in addition to the problem of misused
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