An application of FEATS scoring system in Draw-A Person-in-the-Rain (DAPR): Distinguishing depression, anxiety, and stress by projective drawing

Abstract

The current study is inspired by Linda Gantt’s Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale (FEATS), in which Gantt compared the drawing’s artistic characteristics with properties in DSM-III (Gantt, 2001). The current study is to investigate whether depression, anxiety, and stress have impact on Draw-A-Person-in-the-Rain (DAPR) projective drawing’s content and art elements, and the similarities and difference in the 14 items of FEATS scoring of the three factors. This study demonstrated a mixed research design with experimental procedure as survey, brief interview and observation for data collection. Thematic analysis was used as the interview encoding. 61 participants, with 18 males and 43 females, aged between 18 to 29 were recruited. An integrated model is created to address the issue of identifying Depression, Anxiety, and Stress level in DAPR using implied energy, color fit, and prominence of color in FEATS scale.