Psychological functions in expressionist paintings of introverted children

From the past to the present, the concepts of introversion and extroversion are used to explain personality. Introversion is a personality structure that is difficult to understand when compared to extroversion. In particular, introverted children suppress their emotions, focus on meanings in their own inner world, and become silent and insecure about the outside world. Therefore, they have a socially closed position. This situation, makes it difficult for us to understand the introverted children who are still in their developmental age and prevents us from seeing their needs and problems. This study intended do recognize introverted children in terms of such psychological functions as sensation, thinking, emotion, and intuition. The aim was to reveal introverted children's psychological functions through their expressionist paintings' form and content features. For this purpose, the qualitative research method, which provides an in-depth view was preferred, the examination of the expressionist paintings of introverted children was limited to psychological functions, and the single-case pattern, which is one of the qualitative research designs was used. In determining the participants, the purposeful sampling strategy was used, and a small and homogeneous group consisting of six introverted children and three classroom teachers was studied to examine a specific group in depth. The diversification principle, which is one of the strategies to ensure validity and reliability in qualitative research, has been adopted in obtaining data; qualitative data collection techniques such as interview, observation and document analysis were used. The descriptive analysis approach, which is a deductive approach among qualitative analysis methods, was used to analyze the collected data. Based on the existing conceptual framework for descriptive analysis, a descriptive framework was created using the sensory, thinking, feeling and intuition functions in Carl Gustav Jung's Psychological Types Theory. The findings obtained from the descriptive analysis were interpreted in detail, presented with a reductionist approach in the results section, and after discussion with the relevant literature, necessary suggestions were made for researchers, practitioners, and other beneficiaries.