Heart Drawing, a New Diagnostic Tool: Administration and Scoring Manual

Abstract

Background: A comprehensive assessment includes an evaluation of a persons capacity to identify and regulate emotions.  Affect, or emotional and behavioral regulation requires the capacity to identify internal experiences of emotions.  The Heart Drawing was developed as a non-threatening method for assessing a childs capacity to identify emotions.  Most children enjoy drawing and the Heart drawing is usually experienced by the child as non-threatening and enjoyable.

The Heart Drawing is a new, easy to use, and efficient tool that allows the clinician to assess a childs affect regulation functioning, affective range and experience in a non-threatening manner. It can also be used to assess a childs insightfulness and capacity to identify internal affective experiences. 

Method: The child is asked to select colors for the feelings mad, sad, glad, and scared from a group of eight primary colors.  These simple feelings represent the bulk of a childs emotional experience.  The child is then asked to draw a heart and to fill in the heart with the amount of each feeling that the child usually feels.

Results: Administration and discussion usually takes ten to fifteen minutes. 

Conclusion: The article presents examples of drawing by children with various diagnoses and conditions along with a normative drawing for comparison.  The methodology has been found to be very helpful in assessing a child's emotional status and capacity to regulate emotions.