7.3 Silver Drawing Test (SDT) & Draw-A-Story (DAS)

Non-Verbal Assessment Philosophy of Rawley Silver

The Silver Drawing Test of Cognition and Emotion (SDT) and the Draw-A-Story (DAS) were developed by pioneering art therapist and educator Rawley Silver (EdD, ATR-BC). Silver recognized a critical, systemic limitation in traditional psychological and psychiatric assessment: conventional assessment batteries rely overwhelmingly on verbal fluency, auditory comprehension, and linguistic articulation. Consequently, individuals with verbal or auditory impairments are routinely misdiagnosed, their cognitive abilities underestimated, and their emotional distress overlooked.

Silver specifically engineered her non-verbal assessment instruments to serve diverse, underserved populations, including:

• Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Individuals: Clients who communicate primarily through sign language or visual modalities, eliminating auditory testing bias.
• Speech and Language Impairments: Children and adults with expressive language disorders, developmental apraxia of speech, or selective mutism.
• Neurological and Post-Stroke Patients: Individuals presenting with expressive aphasia, traumatic brain injury (TBI), or stroke-induced cognitive deficits.
• Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Clients: Immigrants, refugees, and non-native English speakers who would be severely penalized by standard English verbal tests.
• Children and Adolescents with Trauma: Youth who lack the developmental vocabulary or emotional defenses to articulate traumatic memories verbally.

Silver synthesized cognitive developmental psychology—most notably the epistemological theories of Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner—with psychodynamic projective principles. Her tests prove that drawing is not merely an aesthetic recreation, but a fundamental cognitive language capable of demonstrating complex spatial reasoning, hypothetical problem-solving, and profound emotional projection.

The Silver Drawing Test of Cognition and Emotion (SDT): Subtests and Architecture

The Silver Drawing Test (SDT) evaluates two distinct psychological domains concurrently: cognitive developmental maturity and underlying emotional content. The SDT comprises three standardized subtests, each administered using dedicated test booklets and drawing stimuli.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                     SILVER DRAWING TEST (SDT) BATTERY                  │
├───────────────────┬───────────────────┬────────────────────────────────┤
│ Subtest 1:        │ Subtest 2:        │ Subtest 3:                     │
│ Predictive Drawing│ Observation       │ Drawing from Imagination       │
├───────────────────┼───────────────────┼────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Piagetian Tasks │ • 3D Cylinders &  │ • Choose 2+ Stimulus Drawings  │
│ • Water-Level Line│   Foam Prisms     │ • Create Original Narrative    │
│ • Plumb-Line Slopes│• Perspective &   │ • Dual Scoring: Cognitive &    │
│ • Spatial Frames  │   Relative Scale  │   Emotional Content (1 to 5)   │
└───────────────────┴───────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┘

Subtest 1: Predictive Drawing (Spatial Concepts)

• Theoretical Basis: Directly adapted from Jean Piaget's water-level and plumb-line conservation experiments, which evaluate an individual's understanding of horizontal and vertical spatial frames of reference.
• Administrative Task: The client is presented with outline drawings of bottles and containers displayed in various orientations: upright, tilted at a 45-degree angle, and lying horizontally. The client is instructed to draw where the water line would be inside each bottle if it were half-full. In the verticality task, the client is shown a picture of a steep mountain slope and instructed to draw a house and trees on the hill.
• Cognitive Evaluation: Evaluates whether the client has achieved spatial conservation and the transition from Piaget's preoperational to concrete and formal operational thought:
  • Preoperational / Concrete Failures: The client draws the water parallel to the tilted base of the bottle (believing water tilts with the glass) or draws trees jutting out at 90-degree right angles to the slanted mountain slope rather than maintaining true gravitational verticality.
  • Mature Operational Success: The client understands that liquid surfaces remain strictly horizontal regardless of bottle orientation and that trees grow vertically upright against gravity.

Subtest 2: Drawing from Observation (Spatial Relations)

• Theoretical Basis: Evaluates visual-spatial perception, proportion, depth cues, and sequential ordering without verbal mediation.
• Administrative Task: A physical, three-dimensional arrangement of geometric forms—typically consisting of a cylinder, a rectangular prism, and a small foam block—is arranged in front of the client on the table. The client is directed to draw the objects exactly as they observe them from their personal line of sight.
• Cognitive Evaluation: Scored on an objective 5-point scale evaluating: accurate depiction of three-dimensional depth, object overlap, proportional scale between objects, and spatial relationships (foreground, middle ground, background).

Subtest 3: Drawing from Imagination (Cognitive Synthesis & Affective Projection)

• Administrative Task: The client is presented with an array of standardized line drawings (the stimulus sheet) depicting various subjects: people, animals, vehicles, and environmental objects. The client is instructed to choose two or more subjects, combine them to create an original picture showing something happening, and provide a title or brief written story.
• Dual Scoring Framework:
  1. Cognitive Scale (Level of Representation & Synthesis): Scored from 1 to 5 based on how successfully the client integrates the chosen stimuli into a coherent, spatial scene (ranging from isolated, unconnected copies at Score 1 to fully integrated, dynamic compositions demonstrating depth and narrative interaction at Score 5).
  2. Emotional Content Scale: Evaluates the emotional tone, interpersonal dynamics, and thematic narrative on Silver's 5-point ordinal scale, where 1 = strongly negative (lethal, morbid, or solitary/helpless content), 3 = ambivalent, neutral, or unemotional, and 5 = strongly positive (effective, caring, or successful relationships). The identical 1-to-5 anchors are used on the Draw-A-Story, which allows scores from the two instruments to be compared directly.

The Draw-A-Story (DAS) Assessment Protocol: Screening Depression and Suicide Risk

Developed by Rawley Silver in 1988 (and updated in 2002), the Draw-A-Story (DAS): Screening for Depression and Emotional Needs is one of the most widely validated projective-objective screening instruments in art therapy. While adapted from Subtest 3 of the SDT, the DAS functions as an autonomous, rapid clinical screening tool designed specifically to detect hidden depression, unexpressed grief, covert aggression, and lethal suicide risk in children, adolescents, and adults.

Standardized Materials and Administration Directive

• Materials: The standardized DAS booklet (containing drawing space and blank lines for writing) and a standard set of 14 stimulus drawing cards. The stimulus drawings depict diverse subjects: an aggressive predator (e.g., lion, snake, shark), a vulnerable creature (e.g., mouse, baby bird, small kitten), human figures of various ages and postures, inanimate vehicles (e.g., car, boat), and environmental props (e.g., ladder, tree, sword).
• The Directive: The clinician lays out the stimulus cards and instructs the client:

"Look at these drawings and choose two or more that interest you. Imagine something happening between the characters or things you chose, then draw a picture showing what is happening. When you finish your drawing, write a story about it below and give your story a title."

If the client is unable to write due to motor limitations, age, or language barriers, the clinician transcribes the client's spoken story verbatim without editorial modification.

The 5-Point Emotional Content Scale: Operational Scoring Criteria

Silver developed an objective, empirically validated 5-point ordinal scale to score the emotional content of the DAS drawing and narrative. Extensive research establishes that persistent low scores strongly correlate with clinical depression, psychiatric hospitalization, and self-harm risk.

Detailed Breakdown of the 5 Emotional Content Scale Points

[!CRITICAL] Empirical Suicide Risk Indicator: In large-scale normative and clinical validation studies, Silver established that individuals who obtain an Emotional Content score of 1 on the DAS—especially when accompanied by persistent themes of helplessness, self-blame, and inescapable death—are at statistically elevated risk for acute clinical depression and active suicidal ideation. A score of 1 warrants an immediate clinical suicide risk assessment.

Differentiating Normal Developmental Aggression from Pathological Violence and Self-Harm

A critical competency evaluated on the ATR-BC examination is the clinician's ability to distinguish developmentally normative aggressive fantasy from pathological aggression, violent acting-out, or lethal self-harm on the DAS.

Developmental Norms vs. Clinical Pathology

Children and adolescents—particularly school-aged boys—frequently depict battle scenes, predator chases, explosions, or superheroes fighting villains. Inexperienced clinicians frequently overpathologize these drawings, mistaking developmental play for violent psychopathology.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                     DAS AGGRESSION DIFFERENTIATION                     │
├───────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┤
│ DEVELOPMENTALLY NORMATIVE         │ CLINICAL PATHOLOGY / SUICIDE RISK  │
│ (Score 2 to 3 / Adaptive)         │ (Score 1 / High Clinical Concern)  │
├───────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┤
│ • Playful cartoon humor           │ • Gruesome mutilation & torture    │
│ • Hero vs. villain combat         │ • Glorification of senseless slaughter
│ • Moral justice restored          │ • Victim has zero defense or agency│
│ • Creative mastery / adventure    │ • Persistent identification with   │
│ • Client identifies with hero     │   helpless victim or dead entity   │
│ • Conventional video-game motifs  │ • Overt themes of suicide/hanging  │
└───────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────┘

Diagnostic Indicators of Pathological Risk

1. Sole Identification with the Hopeless Victim: When the client explicitly identifies with the character undergoing horrific destruction (e.g., "The boy has no friends, so he jumps off the bridge and dies"), signaling collapsed self-worth and suicidal intent.
2. Absence of Justice or Resolution: Unlike superhero combat where evil is defeated, pathological narratives depict unmitigated cruelty where the innocent victim is pulverized without purpose or intervention.
3. Bizarre or Sadistic Details: Depicting meticulous torture, dismemberment, or excessive anatomical gore, which correlates with conduct disorder, severe antisocial traits, or uncontained trauma reenactment.

Comprehensive Comparison Matrix: Silver Drawing Test (SDT) vs. Draw-A-Story (DAS)

The following clinical matrix details the operational architecture, administrative directives, and clinical applications of Rawley Silver's non-verbal assessments:

Psychometric Rigor, Cultural Humility, and ATR-BC Board Standards

Rawley Silver's assessments stand as exemplary models of psychometric rigor in art therapy literature:

• Inter-Rater Reliability: Peer-reviewed studies consistently report inter-rater reliability coefficients ranging from .80 to .95 across trained raters utilizing Silver's standardized visual anchor scoring manuals.
• Cross-Cultural Validity: Because the SDT and DAS bypass English language dependency, validation studies conducted across North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America demonstrate consistent scoring norms across diverse cultural and linguistic demographics.
• Board Examination Integration: On the ATCBE, candidates must remember that while the DAS effectively screens for depressive and suicidal themes, no drawing test is an autonomous diagnostic instrument. A score of 1 on the DAS mandates immediate, direct clinical inquiry (e.g., asking directly: "Have you had thoughts of wanting to end your life?"), consultation with the treatment team, and implementation of a safety plan.