When Children Draw Gods

Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2023

Empirical demonstrations of the embodied and grounded cognition approach, involving diverse areas and phenomena, have increased exponentially in recent years. However, little research has been done in the religious domain. To the best of our knowledge, no study based on this theoretical framework has explored spatial dimension in pictorial representation of the divine in children's drawings or in religious art in general. The present study represents the very first attempt to investigate if and how spatiality is involved in the way children depict the divine in their drawings. Drawings collected from four groups of participants (n = 1156, ages 6-15) characterized by different cultural and religious environments: Japanese (Buddhism and Shinto), Russian-Buryat (Buddhism, Shamanism), Russian Slavic (Christian Orthodoxy), and French-speaking Swiss (Catholic and reformed Christianity) were annotated using the Gauntlet annotation tool and then analysed. The main result indicates that children from all four groups generally depict god (the centre of the annotated representation) in the upper part of their drawings. Further testing indicates that the type of composition (for instance, god depicted alone or as standing on the ground where the sky is also depicted) did not serve as a major influence on the child's placement of god.

Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2023

Supernatural agents, although imagined by humans as omnipresent, cannot escape being placed (at least mentally) by believers somewhere in physical space. For example, kami in Shintoism are believed to reside in natural elements of the landscape. In Christianity, God is typically associated with Heaven. Similarly, Jesus is said to have ascended into Heaven after his resurrection. According to Buddhist mythology, gods live in the heavens, and the next Buddha, Maitreya, will descend to earth from heaven. This study (Part I of a two-part project) investigates the role of spatiality in children's conceptions of the divine as shown through their drawings of god. We collected drawings by participants from four different cultural and religious environments (n = 1156): Japanese (Buddhism and Shinto), Russian-Buryat (Buddhism, Shamanism), Russian Slavic (Christian Orthodoxy) and Frenchspeaking Swiss (Catholic and reformed Christianity). Our study indicates that the tendency to place god in the sky was not strongly related to a particular cultural or religious context. Children from all groups most often drew god either in the sky or with no background at all. We note two implications for folk psychology: (1) Children tend to conceptualize god in single location, (2) They often associate the divine with a celestial background.

Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2023

To conclude this stage of research on the representations of supernatural agents in children's drawings, this chapter summarizes some of the main results of the works collected in this volume. The use of drawings to study children's representations is not a classic methodology in child psychology. Analysing images is challenging on different levels: content analysis, material features of the drawings, and the development of technical tools needed for the analysis. This chapter discusses the benefits and the limitations of this methodology, as well as those of interdisciplinary approaches that try to combine computer vision methods with studies on child and adolescent development. It ends with the presentation of specific research ideas generated by this first stage of investigation, ideas which we propose as a program for a second stage of research.

ArXiv, 2015

This paper introduces a novel approach to data analysis designed for the needs of specialists in psychology of religion. We detect developmental and cross-cultural patterns in children's drawings of God(s) and other supernatural agents. We develop methods to objectively evaluate our empirical observations of the drawings with respect to: (1) the gravity center, (2) the average intensities of the colors \emph{green} and \emph{yellow}, (3) the use of different colors (palette) and (4) the visual complexity of the drawings. We find statistically significant differences across ages and countries in the gravity centers and in the average intensities of colors. These findings support the hypotheses of the experts and raise new questions for further investigation.

2019

The current thesis has investigated children’s representations of God in French-speaking Switzerland by relying mainly on visual data (i.e., drawings). A sample of N = 532 drawings of God were collected among 5- to 17-year-olds, girls and boys, who were met either during religious class or during regular schooling. Three lines of inquiry have addressed the following respective issues: de- anthropomorphization, gender-typing and emotional expression. The first two lines of inquiry were motivated by the further examination of main topics tackled in past research. The last one was meant to confront an issue that was never specifically addressed before, although prevalent across such data. For each line of inquiry, a quantitative study was completed by a more specific qualitative exploration. Whether children would depict God as anthropomorphic or non-anthropomorphic depended on age and schooling. Being older and receiving religious education were associated with non- anthropomorphic re...

New approaches to the scientific study of religion, 2023

This research addresses how gods may be gender-typed in children's drawings. It offers cross-cultural comparisons on four distinct samples of drawings from Japan, Switzerland, Buryatia and Saint Petersburg (Russia). We discuss the challenges that arise when rating gender categories in children's drawings, especially when drawing on a cross-cultural sample. Then we propose two approaches for the empirical analysis of the data: (1) providing a general description of the utilization of gender categories; (2) considering the data from a qualitative perspective, comparing children's strategies and cultural references. In the main, while there seems to be cultural differences (as observed between samples), three main sources of normative pressure might exist: androcentrism, same-gender preference, and masculine hegemony. We discuss the observed phenomena in terms of socionormative influence, cultural and religious references made available, gender traits, and gender transgression.

Springer eBooks, 2023

In 2014, we collected more than 3000 drawings of God in Iran. Here we present the conditions for this collection and the results derived from it. We interpret our findings from the perspective of developmental psychology, and discuss them in terms of social, cultural, and contextual factors (media, formal and informal education). We consider God representation with regard to Iranian-Islamic culture. Additionally, we make a brief comparison between our findings, drawn from participants in Iran, and the findings of studies conducted in Western cultures. Finally, limitations of the study and future research directions are critically discussed. Keywords Culture • Developmental psychology • God representation • Religious development • Psychology of religion Research indicates that our understanding of the complexity and multidimensionality of children's concepts of God 1 is still developing (Dandarova-Robert et al., 2016; Khodayarifard et al., 2015). For a detailed review of literature on multidimensional factors affecting children's drawings of God (see Chap. 2, this volume). 1 Why the term god begins sometimes with an uppercase letter G, sometimes with a lowercase letter g, and why it appears sometimes in the singular and sometimes in the plural, is explained in the introductive chapter of this book (Chap. 1, this volume).

2018

The concept of god, at least in some religious traditions, is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp, and presupposes a long evolution in an individual. The interdisciplinary project " Drawings of gods : A multicultural and interdisciplinary approach to children’s representations of supernatural agents " aims to demonstrate the richness of drawing as a method for studying representations of god in children and thus contribute to our understanding of this concept, its origins and its development. In this perspective, drawings from a variety of cultural and religious traditions (Switzerland, Japan, Russia, Iran, Brazil, Netherlands and so on) were collected and analysed by the project team and their partners from different countries. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together these researchers with the objective on one side of sharing the results of their research, and on the other side critically examining the contributions and limitations of this methodology, w...

Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2023

This introduction presents the project Children's Drawings of Gods, relating its history from its origins through the present day. Following this recounting, we explain the organisation of this volume, introduce its parts and subparts, and briefly describe the content of each chapter.

Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2023

In contrast to mainstream research methods in psychology, the project Children's Drawings of Gods encompasses computer vision and mathematical methods to analyse the data (drawings and drawing annotations). The first part of the present work describes a set of methods designed to extract measures, namely features, directly from the drawings and from annotations of the images. Then, the dissimilarities between the drawings are computed based on particular features (such as the gravity centre of the smallest image unit, namely pixel, or the annotated position of god) and combined in order to measure numerically the differences between the drawings. In the second part, we conduct an exploratory data analysis based on these dissimilarities, including multidimensional scaling and clustering, in order to determine whether the chosen features permit us to distinguish the different strategies that the children used to draw god.