Heart Drawing Tool
What It Measures
The Heart Drawing asks a child to do something simple: pick a color for mad, sad, glad, and scared from a set of nine, then draw a heart and fill it in with however much of each feeling they usually carry.
What comes back is a picture of the child's emotional world as they understand it. How many feelings do they recognize? Is one color filling most of the heart? Can they say anything about why they filled it that way? The drawing itself is only half of it — the conversation that follows is where a clinician learns whether the child can name internal states at all. It was designed to be non-threatening, since most children enjoy drawing.
Further Reading
Additional Notes
Licensing Notes: Published by Arthur Becker-Weidman, PhD, and Emily Becker-Weidman, PhD, in Review of European Studies (2016), an open-access journal. The method is described fully in the article, and requires only paper and colored pencils or markers.
Learn More: The developers position the Heart Drawing as a projective technique, drawn from work with the House-Tree-Person drawing test and with art therapists on the use of color. It is described as usable with children from age 3 through 19, and takes 10 to 15 minutes including the discussion.