The reflection of middle school students' metaphorical perceptions of emotions on their artistic creativity

This study aims to examine how middle school students' metaphorical perceptions of emotions (happiness and sadness) are reflected in their artistic creativity. The study was conducted in a medium-sized secondary school in the 2022-2023 academic year. The study group consisted of 70 (30 female / 40 male) 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students. The research was designed with phenomenology, one of the qualitative research methods. The data collection tools used in the study were the data collection form through metaphor to determine the students' perceptions of the concept of happiness and sadness, and the students' artistic works related to the concept of happiness and sadness and their comments about their works. From the data of the study, middle school students' metaphors about the concepts of happiness and sadness were analyzed by content analysis. According to the results of the research, it was observed that students produced metaphors such as friendship, family, and play for the concept of happiness and emphasized the concepts they liked more, while the metaphors they used for the concept of sadness were negative concepts such as misfortune, absence, and failure. While reflecting their emotions in their artistic works, middle school students used concepts such as friendship, smiling, family, and play for happiness, while they preferred concepts such as failure, defeat, politics, insecurity, and hunger for sadness, and it was determined that what middle school students wrote and drew overlapped with each other. Keywords: Visual Arts, Metaphor, Art Education, Emotion