Psychological Interpretation of Drawings by Color Analysis for Mental Therapy

Authors

  • Chieko Kato Toyo University
  • Tadahiko Kimoto Toyo University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14738/aivp.34.1316

Keywords:

Drawing therapy, Cognitive behavioral therapy, Psychological primary colors, Mathematical morphology, Image segmentation, Color space division.

Abstract

In order to provide psychotherapists with an objective criterion for evaluating client's mental states, this paper proposes a method for analyzing a drawing that a client makes in drawing therapy for four psychological primary colors. The method consists of two steps: an image segmentation step and a color analysis step. In the first step, those areas which seem what the client intended to depict are extracted from the entire digitized image. The effective resolution in the extraction is made variable with the values of parameters in mathematically morphological processing. In the second step, the pixels of the extracted areas are classified into four categories, corresponding to the psychological primary colors, as determined by the dominant component of a pixel color.
A case study of employing the color analyses in drawing therapy was carried out with a series of drawings which were obtained in an actual clinical therapy. A comparison of the objective results of the analysis and subjective evaluations obtained in the process of cognitive behavioral therapy has demonstrated that the analyses are useful to describe a variation in a client's mental state in terms of psychological properties of colors. In conclusion, the color analysis method in drawing therapy works in cooperation with cognitive behavioral therapy.

Author Biographies

Chieko Kato, Toyo University

Faculty of Information Sciences and Arts

Professor

Tadahiko Kimoto, Toyo University

Faculty of Science and Engineering

Professor

References

(1) Malchiodi, C.A. ed., Handbook of art therapy, 2nd ed. 2011, Guilford Press (USA).

(2) Beck, J.S., Cognitive behavior therapy: basics and beyond, 2nd ed. 2011, Guilford Press (USA).

(3) Thyme, K.E., Wiberg, B., Lundman, B., Graneheim, U.H., Qualitative content analysis in art psychotherapy research: Concepts, procedures, and measures to reveal the latent meaning in pictures and the words attached to the pictures. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 2013, 40: p. 101-107.

(4) Kim, D., Son, S.W., Jeong, H., Large-scale quantitative analysis of painting arts. Scientific Reports, 2014, DOI: 10.1038, p. 1-7.

(5) Nijdam, N.A., Mapping emotion to color. 2005,http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/verslagen/capita-selecta/CS-Nijdam-Niels.pdf.

(6) Color psychology http://micco.se/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Micco-Groenholm-on-Color-Affects-System.pdf

(7) Giardina, C.R., Dougherty, E.R., Morphological method in image and signal processing. 1988, Printice Hall, Inc. (NJ, USA).

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Published

2015-09-02

How to Cite

Kato, C., & Kimoto, T. (2015). Psychological Interpretation of Drawings by Color Analysis for Mental Therapy. European Journal of Applied Sciences, 3(4), 1. https://doi.org/10.14738/aivp.34.1316