A Study of the Visual Reflection of Heaven and Hell in Paintings by Children of 6 to 9 Years Old in Iran

The goal: Psychological studies indicate that the child''s painting reflects her/his conscious and unconscious learning about various concepts and also expresses whatever s/he fails to talk about. The children’s subjective concern about religious issues and questions is one of the subjects which appear in their paintings because of their inability to talk about them. The goal of this research is to study the visual reflection of heaven and hell in paintings by Iranian children of 6 to 9 years old. The The present paper is an applied research and uses descriptive and survey methods. After studying psychological reasons of children''s tendency to painting and analysis of the applied symbols and colors in their paintings، a collection of 6 to9-year-old children''s paintings about «heaven and hell» was gathered from several cities of Iran by using multistage cluster sampling. The variables of this research paper are the symbols and colors applied in the children''s paintings. The findings and the The findings of studying approximately 1000 samples by using statistic software (SPSS) in two different levels of “percentage” and “abundance” in descriptive statistics، reveal that heaven is the symbol of peace and ease، while hell represents chaos and anxiety in the mind of the Iranian children. Analyzing the samples lead to this conclusion that the image of hell is more accessible and tangible than heaven in the minds of the Iranian children.