The purpose of this study was to fill the current knowledge gap on school-age children’s
representation of romantic love. To this end, in our main experiment, we used
a drawing task to avoid the drawbacks of verbal tasks and to secure indirect access to
children’s representations. Performing content analysis, we identified graphic indicators
used by children to depict romantic love in their drawings. Children’s depiction of
these graphic indicators varied as a function of age and gender.
It is important to note first that none of the drawings we collected was rated as
non-expressive, regardless of drawer’s age. This means that, in our sample, every
child—even the youngest—was able to depict at least one graphic indicator of romantic
love in his or her drawing. However, in line with H1, we found age differences in the
number of graphic indicators used: between 6 and 10 years old, children used an
increasing number of graphic indicators in their drawings. More precisely, we found an
increasing use with age of five graphic indicators out of seven (i.e., ‘speech’, ‘cheeks’,
‘heart-shaped eyes’, ‘sophisticated outfit’ and ‘weather’). A control experiment ruled
out the possibility that older children were more apt than younger ones to make
changes in their second drawing, regardless of their representation of the topic. Indeed,
when asked to draw a tree and then a Christmas tree (i.e., a topic that even young
children are expected to know very well and to have an elaborate representation of),
younger and older children did not significantly differ in terms of the number of
graphic indicators depicted in their Christmas tree drawings. In our opinion, the age
progression we observed in children’s depiction of a person in love thus reflects
children’s developing representation of romantic love. Using a more elaborate and
complex representation, children were gradually able to access more expressive ideas
to depict the emotion of love in their drawings (Brechet et al., 2009; Jolley, 2010). For
instance, the increasing use of the indicator ‘speech’ with age is likely to be related to
children’s developing comprehension that words are a powerful medium through
which romantic