COMPARATIVE STUDY OF EMOTIONALLY DISTURBED AND NORMAL CHILDREN USING EMOTIONAL INDICATORS ON BENDER GESTALT TEST
ABSTRACT
Koppitz's emotional indicator for BGT was developed half a century back. But its relevance has less been frequently studied. The current study aims to compare Koppitz's emotional indicators on BGT drawings among emotionally disturbed and normal children. It was a matched control group design. The sample was 46 children aged 6 to 11 years. They were either attending psychiatry OPD at Tribhuwan University Teaching Hospital or the pupils studying at private schools in Kathmandu Valley. CBQ was used to screen emotional disturbance of the children. They were screened as emotionally disturbed or normal children and divided into two groups accordingly. Each group consisted of 23 participants matched for age, sex and academic grade. BGT was administered to all the participants as per standard procedure on one to one basis, and BGT drawings of the participants were analyzed for the presence of emotional indicators.
Twelve emotional indicators were used for the study. The mean number of emotional indicators of emotionally disturbed group and normal group was 2.29 and 1.13 respectively. Total number of emotional indicators were significantly more among the emotionally disturbed group; with 82 % (19 out of 23) of emotionally disturbed children having total score 2 or more in their BGT drawings, while all the normal children were having total score between zero and 2. However, only two individual emotional indicators like small size and overwork were found significantly more among the emotionally disturbed children. There was no statistically significant difference for the occurrence of other individual emotional indicators. Relevance of indicators like second attempt and constriction has been questioned by the findings of the study as there were no occurrences of these two indicators among both the group. Implication of using BGT emotional indicator for studying emotionally disturbed and normal children is further discussed.
Author: Dr. Suraj Shakya