Drawing Assessments and Their Limits — HTP, KFD and DAP, Formal-Element Rating, Illusory Correlation and Ethics

How did drawing assessment begin?

Attempts to understand people through drawings go back to the early 20th century. Goodenough (1926) created a test that estimated children’s intellectual development from the number of details in their drawings of a person. Later, several tests emerged from the projective hypothesis that drawings reveal personality and emotion.

Test	Creator	Method	Interpretive assumption
Draw-a-Person (DAP)	Machover (1949)	Draw a person	Size and details of the figure reflect self-image and conflicts
House-Tree-Person (HTP)	Buck (1948)	Draw a house, a tree and a person separately	House = home life, tree = unconscious self, person = conscious self
Kinetic Family Drawing (KFD)	Burns & Kaufman (1970)	Draw the family doing something	Distances and actions between figures reflect family dynamics

The scientific evidence: problems of reliability and validity

Projective drawing tests are widely used in clinical practice, but research findings are largely negative.

• Weak validity of specific signs: reviewing figure-drawing research, Swensen (1968) concluded there was little evidence that individual signs such as “large eyes = paranoia” or “omitted hands = guilt” actually predict those traits.
• Assessment of projective techniques as a whole: Lilienfeld, Wood and Garb (2000) judged that most drawing tests, including figure drawings, fail to meet standards of reliability and validity, though they allowed that global impressions of an entire drawing may help slightly in roughly distinguishing severe adjustment problems.

Illusory correlation: a trap even experts fall into

Chapman and Chapman (1967) showed university students figure drawings randomly paired with the “symptoms” of the people who drew them. Although the pairings were constructed to be unrelated, students “discovered” intuitively plausible links in the data, such as “suspicious people draw large eyes” — links almost identical to the interpretations clinicians believed at the time. People see expected relationships more strongly than the data warrant: this is illusory correlation.

An alternative: rating formal elements

One attempt to reduce subjective interpretation is Gantt and Tabone’s (1998) FEATS (Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale). Drawings made in response to “Draw a person picking an apple from a tree” are scored not on content but on formal elements such as colour use, use of space, detail, logic and problem solving. The aim is higher inter-rater agreement, but its validity as a diagnostic tool still needs more research.

Using drawing assessments ethically

• As tools for conversation, not diagnosis: use drawings to help clients explain themselves, and don’t draw conclusions from a single drawing.
• Alongside other information: judge comprehensively, together with interviews, standardised scales, observation and family information.
• Caution in judging child abuse: there is no evidence that particular drawing features alone can identify abuse. If concerns arise, follow established procedures (interviews, reporting systems), not the drawing.
• Beware of online drawing tests: enjoy viral “what your tree drawing says about you” content for fun, but don’t use it for self-diagnosis.

The concepts of reliability and validity in psychological assessment more broadly are covered in Psychology Basics, Chapter 9.

Check questions

Question 1. A therapist says they have often confirmed the interpretation that “people who draw knotholes on the tree in the HTP have experienced trauma.” What cognitive trap might be at work?

Answer. Illusory correlation. It’s easy to remember cases that fit the expected relationship and overlook cases with knotholes but no trauma, or trauma but no knotholes. It needs to be tested with systematic data.

Question 2. How does the FEATS differ from traditional projective interpretation?

Answer. Instead of interpreting what the content of a drawing symbolises, it scores formal elements such as colour use, use of space and detail on set scales — an approach aimed at reducing rater subjectivity and improving reliability.

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References

• Goodenough, F. L. (1926). Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings. World Book.
• Buck, J. N. (1948). The H-T-P technique: A qualitative and quantitative scoring manual. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 4(4), 317–396.
• Machover, K. (1949). Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure. Charles C Thomas.
• Burns, R. C., & Kaufman, S. H. (1970). Kinetic Family Drawings (K-F-D). Brunner/Mazel.
• Swensen, C. H. (1968). Empirical evaluations of human figure drawings: 1957–1966. Psychological Bulletin, 70(1), 20–44.
• Lilienfeld, S. O., Wood, J. M., & Garb, H. N. (2000). The scientific status of projective techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 1(2), 27–66.
• Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1967). Genesis of popular but erroneous psychodiagnostic observations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 72(3), 193–204.
• Gantt, L., & Tabone, C. (1998). The Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale: The Rating Manual. Gargoyle Press.