Violent Media, Children's Drawings, and Emotional Desensitization: A Visual-Emotional Counseling Framework
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This study examines how digital content featuring horror and violence becomes internalized in a symbolic-emotional manner within early childhood imagination and manifests in children's imaginative drawings, along with its implications for expressive counseling practice within Early Childhood Guidance and Counseling. Employing a qualitative approach with an instrumental case study design, the research focuses on an eight-year-old boy (AP) with intensive digital exposure as the primary participant and a five-year-old girl (MFR) as a contrast. Data were collected through analysis of imaginative drawings, behavioral observation, and parental interviews conducted from May to August 2023 and were analyzed using NVivo-based inductive thematic analysis, yielding 42 codes across seven themes. The findings identify four sources of digital media exposure—horror games, YouTube, television, and TikTok—manifested in nine horror-violence-themed objects, patterns of creative modification as evidence of deep internalization, the dominance of black as an emotional indicator, and three concrete instances of content transfer into real-world behavior. The absence of parental mediation was found to significantly exacerbate the impact of such exposure. This study offers three contributions: (1) validation of imaginative drawing as a valid nonverbal assessment instrument; (2) empirical evidence of the connection between drawing content and children's actual behavior; and (3) the Visual-Emotional Counseling Framework (VECF) as a foundation for Early Childhood Guidance and Counseling practice responsive to the challenges of digital childhood.
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