The psychological interpretation of drawings, as part of expressive techniques, can be a very interesting resource in the evaluation of certain cases.
Drawing tests can be a valuable source of information about an individual’s personal characteristics, such as intelligence, motor coordination, learning skills, and the level of cognitive development.
- Criticism of these techniques has always been numerous and is based on a certain foundation.
- So.
- And despite being a useful tool.
- We should consider them as a resource to apply with other psychological evaluation techniques.
“Every act of expression or response of an individual, in a way, bears the mark of his personality. ” – Hammer (1978)?
The analysis of expressive techniques should begin from the moment they are administered, there is a lot of valuable information on how to start it, the initial mood and the degree of difficulty it represents for the person, within the administration itself it would be good to take into account:
The analysis of expressive techniques provides a lot of valuable information from the beginning of the administration of the test.
This is a very popular test, especially among children, that allows to know the relationships that the individual has with other members of the family, aspects such as that it is drawn first, size, proportions, which is in the center of the drawing, etc. are evaluated.
The distance between the characters is a scale that indicates the degree of emotional distance we have with the rest of the people represented in the drawing, the farther, the greater the emotional distance. Numbers at different heights may indicate communication problems.
We can collect a lot of information by analyzing the representation of the human figure and the relationship with the symbolism of body organs and clothing. This test applies to children, adolescents and adults, although its effectiveness has not been experimentally tested.
The tree test is a symbolic parallel with the individual who designs it, it is one of the projective techniques that helps us evaluate the development of the designer, his cognitive deficiencies, the possible traumas and the content of his unconscious.
Spatial symbology
When we design a house, we shape our intrafamily relationships. The fireplace would symbolize social contact: if smoke comes out, you could say that we are loving people.
If we make a way home, we would reveal a need for closeness to others, and if we put a fence around, we would manifest a state in which we are especially concerned about protecting our privacy.
There is more evidence derived from these basic designs in expressive techniques, but basically the elements would be analyzed in the same way as explained here.
We should remember that expressive techniques, while very creative and fun to use, should always be associated with other psychological evaluation tools.