Formal properties of spontaneous figure drawings are associated with contemporaneous affective state

This study examines whether the formal properties of spontaneous figure drawings reflect how people feel at the time of drawing. Adult participants drew a figure without instructions to communicate emotion and reported their current affective state.

Drawings were assessed using both human ratings of formal elements and computational image statistics. Forty drawing features were reduced to nine interpretable components, which explained meaningful variance in affect after controlling for drawing time and artistic skill. The strongest and most robust associations were with negative affect, and human ratings and computational features each contributed unique information.

The findings suggest that everyday drawings contain measurable signatures of contemporaneous affective state, even among untrained participants, and provide a reproducible framework for studying how emotion is expressed in visual form.