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Children's picture drawing indicates their friendshipsMeasuring intimacy in young children using picture drawings 
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Identifying a child's affiliative feelings toward peers is important in developmental psychology since such feelings increase understanding of how relationships are established. Unfortunately, conventional measurements suffer from such problems as the time required for preparation and excessive eagerness from children who want to satisfy their perceived impressions. We investigated whether children's affiliative feelings toward a peer can be measured by a picture-drawing task, which can be easily conducted without disclosing its purpose. In this task, 3- to 6-year-olds drew themselves and a peer on a drawing paper. The distances between the two closest points along the horizontal axis were significantly related to affiliative feelings held by the drawer toward a drawn peer; the more affiliative feelings the drawer had, the shorter the distance between the figures. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to reveal that picture drawing can measure a child's affiliative feelings toward a peer.
[1] A.Shinohara, M. Narazaki, T. Kobayashi, “Children's affiliation toward peers reflected in their picture drawings,” Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 55, pp. 2733-2742, 2023.
[2] A.Shinohara, M. Narazaki, T. Kobayashi, “Children draw favorite peers close to them in pictures: Longitudinal evidence using social network analyses,” under review.
Asami Shinohara, Child Development Research Group, Innovative Communication Laboratory