Children with autism can express social emotions in their drawings

Objectives The study aimed to examine the ability of children with an Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) to depict social (pride and shame) vs. basic (happiness and sadness) emotions in their human figure drawings. Methods Eleven children with a formal diagnosis of an ASC matched on gender and verbal mental age with 11 children with typical development (TD) participated in a series of tasks examining their emotional understanding, as well as their ability to depict a person experiencing the emotions under investigation and a person with no emotions. Drawings were assessed for their overall emotional expressiveness and the types of graphic cues employed to express emotions. Results Results showed that children with ASC produced less expressive drawings of basic emotions than their controls. However, they did not differ from the control group in their overall expressiveness in drawing social emotions, despite their reduced performance in tasks assessing understanding of social emotions. Additionally, children with ASC used significantly less graphic cues to depict emotions than children with TD, while some qualitative differences between the two groups were observed. Conclusion The study underlines the value of drawing as a tool to investigate emotion understanding in children with ASC