Finnish and English children’s colour use to depict affectively characterised figures Short title: Cultural influence on colour choice

Recent research has shown that children use colours systematically in relation to how they feel about certain colours and the figures that they draw. This study explored cultural differences between Finnish and English children’s use of colour to represent figures with contrasting emotional characters. One hundred and eight children (54 Finnish, 54 English) were divided into two age groups (5-7 years and 7-9 years). All children coloured three emotionally characterised drawings and rated their affect towards the ten colours provided and the three differentially characterised figures. It was found that Finnish and English children differed in their use of colour for drawings of neutral and nasty figures. The findings are discussed in terms of the need to explore the role of culture in mediating children’s use of colour when drawing figures they feel negatively and positively towards. 3 Introduction Psychologists have argued that certain properties of children’s drawings can be seen as a product of factors beyond the perceptual-motor and cognitive factors required to produce a drawing. There is a long-standing tradition of research that has investigated whether the positive or negative feelings children hold towards topics they draw are reflected in certain properties of their drawings. It has been suggested that such feelings can be reflected in the size of the drawn figures (e.g. Burkitt, Barrett & Davis, 2003a, 2004; Craddick, 1961, 1963; Koppitz, 1966, 1968; Machover, 1949), through the spatial organisation of figures in their drawings (Bombi & Pinto, 1994) and through differences in the details children use to show positive or negative characters (e.g. Burkitt, Barrett, & Davis, 2004, 2005). A further property used by children to signal how they feel about a topic is colour. It has frequently been argued that children’s colour choices are affected by the feelings that they hold towards the drawing topics (e.g., Alschuler & Hattwick, 1943, 1947; Arnheim, 1956, 1974, 1986; Brick, 1944; Golomb, 1981, 1992; Hammer, 1997;Winston, Kenyon, Stewardson, & Lepine, 1995). However, the majority of claims to the effect that colour choice is emotionally significant in children’s drawings have been based on professional observation rather than on formal experimentation (Hammer, 1997; Malchiodi, 1998; McNiff, 1992). Yet, recent experimental research has addressed previous methodological concerns (see Burkitt et al., 2003b, 2004, 2005) and shown that children systematically alter their choice of specific colours depending on the emotional descriptions of the figures and the way they felt about specific colours. It is important to understand how children from different cultures might use colours to signify how they feel about what they draw. Children’s drawings continue to be interpreted for emotional information about the child (Dalley, 1984; Hammer, 1997; 4 Hunsley, Lee & Wood, 2003), and in their own right to determine how the child artist feels about topics in their life (Forrest & Thomas, 1991; Kelly, 1984). It is also important to study cultural differences in colour use in relation to affect as it is unclear whether children are influenced by cultural pictorial conventions or by a more generalisable affective mechanism when they choose certain colours in relation to their feelings towards drawing topics and their colour preferences. Recent systematic research has only sampled children from across England (e.g. Burkitt et al., 2003b, 2004, 2005) and has not included a direct comparison between two cultural groups in one study. There is reason to believe that colour use would vary between cultures in relation to children’s affect towards different colours and different drawing topics. Children’s acquisition of colour terms, range of colour terms, preferences for specific colours, and categorisation of colours have been shown to vary across certain cultures (Gesche, 1927; Nelson, Allan, & Nelson, 1971; Robertson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; Stabler & Johnson, 1972; Subes, 1959; Zentner, 2001), as have children’s associations of different kinds of affect with different colours (Adams & Osgood, 1973). English and Finnish children’s use of colour was compared in the present study. English children were selected as a control group as previous research showing that children represent positive topics with favoured colours and less positive topics with less favoured colours (Burkitt et al., 2003b, 2004, 2005) was based on English samples. Finnish children were chosen as a comparative group as they have been found to offer the most differentiated affective associations of colours from a sample of twenty-three countries (Adams & Osgood, 1973). Moreover, Finnish and British groups have been found to vary widely on various dimensions of cultural values, for example, on the dimensions of individualism-collectivism and masculinity-femininity (Hofstede’s, 5 1984), with the Finnish group showing more feminine and less individualistic values than British group. Finnish and English children were therefore chosen for comparison in the present study due to such cultural differences in generalised values and specific colour-affect associations. The present study was therefore designed to explore whether past findings (Burkitt et al., 2003b, 2004, 2005) would generalise across English and Finnish cultural groups. Specifically it was designed to assess whether there would be differences in colour use for the three characterised figures, whether children would use colours in relation to their preference for individual colours and the emotional valence of the drawn figure and whether both groups would rate the three characterised figures in the anticipated directions. Method Participants Children in both cultural groups were selected from age appropriate kindergartens and schools on the basis of having lived exclusively in either Finland or England. The groups were matched for socio-economic background on the basis of school and family demographics. Table 1 shows the mean age, age range and number of boys and girls in each cultural and age group. INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE Materials Children were provided with a pre-drawn outline of a man on a standard sheet of white A4 size paper for each colouring task (see Figure 1).