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

Background: A comprehensive assessment includes an evaluation of a person’s 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 child’s 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 child’s
affect regulation functioning, affective range and experience in a non-threatening manner. It can also
be used to assess a child’s 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 child’s 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.