Associations between primary school children’s perceptions of parental acceptance and rejection, and their drawings of a “Person Picking an Apple from a Tree”

 The present study of 644 Greek school-age children (323 boys and 321 girls, ages 10–12) examined and compared associations between perceptions of parental acceptanceand rejection, and their unique depictionsof a “Person Picking an Apple from a Tree”or “PPAT”drawings. Perception of parental behavior was measured by the "Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire” (Rohner & Khaleque, 2005). Drawing content was analyzed quantitatively according the Symbolic Content rating system in PPAT drawings (SC-PPAT: Bat Or, Ishai, & Levi, 2014, 2017). We employed K-means cluster analysis and obtained three relatively discrete PPAT scripts.Drawing scripts were found to be associated with children’s perceptions of parental behavior.These associations were found mainly among boys, especially when perceiving their parents as highly aggressive. These results demonstrate how empirical inquiry into PPAT content contributes to identifying implicit relational representations in the drawings.Furthermore, they reinforce the valueinexaminingdrawings from a holistic perspective, i.e.not just the individual components, but also the relationship between such components; while focusing on the relational experience of children as expressed through their pictorial PPAT narratives.