Who’s watching matters: How audience familiarity shapes children’s self-drawings of pride

Abstract

This study examined how audience familiarity influences children’s expression of pride in self-drawings. One hundred and thirty-two children aged 9 were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions: control (no audience), familiar audience, and unfamiliar audience. Each child completed two drawings: a baseline neutral self-drawing, followed by a pride-related self-drawing. In the two audience conditions, children were told that someone familiar or unfamiliar would see their pride drawing. A content analysis was conducted to identify graphic cues used to depict pride. Results revealed a significant interaction between condition and gender on the number of graphic cues. Girls in the familiar audience condition included significantly more pride-related cues than in the control or unfamiliar conditions. No significant differences were found among boys across conditions. Analyses also showed that specific types of cues (i.e., posture, sport, and other contextual cues) were more frequently used by girls in the familiar condition. These findings suggest that the self-depiction of pride is more strongly activated in an explicit communicative context, especially when the audience is familiar. This effect was particularly salient among girls, supporting the view that they are more sensitive than boys to audience familiarity when expressing self-conscious emotions such as pride.