Asking children to draw the protagonist's emotion while listening to a story improves their monitoring and understanding of this situational dimension
Résumé
This study examines whether children’s ability to understand the emotional dimension of a story could be enhanced by asking them to produce expressive drawings. Precisely, we attempted to link two abilities regarding emotional knowledge: Children’s ability to produce emotional inferences from stories (Blanc, 2010, 2014) and their ability to depict the protagonist’s emotions in drawings (Brechet, Baldy & Picard, 2009).Method: Two hundred and thirty-eight children aged between 6 and 10 were randomized in one of the two experimental conditions (i.e., listening story with or without performing an online drawing task). We selected two stories available on a CD audio. To assess their ability to monitor the emotional dimension, we constructed twelve statements they had to judge regarding their comprehension of the story (judgment task). These statements enabled us to examine whether children were able to accurately represent story passages that provided explicit emotional information (e.g., an emotional label, an emotional behaviour) or strongly suggested an emotional inference. For the drawing task, we used contour of character drawings children had to complete to depict the emotion on the character’s face. Children were asked to listen to each story carefully. In the condition without drawing, they only performed the judgment task after listening the whole story. In the condition with drawing, the same task was administrated to children but the presentation of the story was stopped twice so that they performed online the drawing task (two drawings per story).Results: The drawing task exerts a positive effect on the representation of characters’ emotion. Indeed, children aged between 6 to 10 benefited from the presence of this online task that helped them to judge more accurately the emotional statements. Discussion. Overall, this study highlights that an online drawing task can sustain children’s comprehension of the emotional dimension of a story.
