Young Children's Understanding About The Emotional States And Personal Traits Of Painter And His Drawings

The coming of the era of "picture reading" calls for the cultivating of citizens with visual art accomplishment. Therefore, it is the demand of the times to strengthen the art education during early childhood.The study of preschool children's cognition to emotional states, personal traits and painting styles of painter as well as its developmental trends and influential factors will provide us an all-around and profound understanding of children's psychological development of aesthetic apperception. Furthermore, the findings will also contribute to the formulating of curriculum standards of fine arts and enriching the studies of children's mind theory.Based on former researches, the present study designed two experiments to examine young children's cognition of the relations between the drawings and the features of its producer. Meanwhile, children's oral reports and responds have been discussed to find their strategy-selection.In the first experiment, 100 children of 3.5-5.5 years old have been randomly chosen from four average kindergartens of Shanghai's urban area as participants. They have to match the drawings for the drawers according to their cognition of the formal factors (lines, colors and contents) of the pictures and the emotional states of the drawers.In the second experiment, 120 children of 5-6 years old from two average kindergartens of Shanghai's urban area have been included. Children were randomly assigned into two conditions, either providing with example drawings or providing with trait stories to investigate their sensitivity to the styles of different drawings.The results are as below:(1) Children at 3.5 years have already gained the ability to recognize other's emotional states especially positive emotions according to his behaviors, tone of voice and expression, however, they can't discover the relations between the emotional states of drawer and his drawings;(2) 4.5 years old children have got rudimentary knowledge about drawer's emotional states and his drawings, which related to the formal factors of the drawing and girl's performance is better than boy;(3) Children's attention to the pictorial factors experiences a developmental trend of from color and content to line;(4) Children at 5 years can recognize certain style of a picture while this ability is ready for further developing;(5) The understanding of the painter's trait increases children's sensitivity to the painting style;(6) During 5-6 years old, children's cognition to the relations between a painter's trait and his products witnesses a rapid development from randomly matching to match by value and finally to match by trait.According to the findings, suggestions on designing and implementing arts activities in kindergarten as well as the effective ways to enhance children's apprehension of other's emotional states and personal traits have been advanced at the end of the thesis.