Understanding and drawing sadness, anger and fear: The importance of the trigger event of these emotions in stories

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The purpose of this study was to examine whether the type of trigger event of an emotion (i.e., weak versus strong) had an impact on children‘s abilities to infer a character‘s emotion (Blanc, 2010; Davidson, Luo & Burden, 2001) and to depict this emotion in their drawing (Brechet, 2013; Jolley, 2009). Three hundred and fifty four children aged between 6 and 10 participated in this study. We used three stories that evoked sadness, anger and fear through two kinds of trigger events (i.e., weak versus strong). For the drawing task, we used models of drawings representing characters of the story. For the identification task, we used three emoticons (i.e., sad, angry, frightened) and the symbol ―ϕ‖ for the choice ―other‖. Children listened to each story carefully. Each story was interrupted twice so that children can complete the drawing task: they had to depict on the character‘s face the emotion he was supposed to feel given the situation described in the story. Children were then asked to perform an identification task, in which they had to identify the emotion they intended to depict in their drawings, by copying the corresponding emoticon. Note that the emotion children had to draw and to identify was never explicitly mentioned in the story. For each age group, three experimental sessions were required, one per story. The results show an effect of the type of trigger event on children‘s abilities to identify and to draw, depending on emotion, children‘s age and type of task. These results lead to a better understanding of the relationships between children‘s ability to infer emotions from a story and their ability to depict these emotions in their drawing. Our results also highlight the importance of taking into account the type of trigger event, when investigating the development of these two abilities.