Handwriting and Drawing Features for Detecting Personality Traits: An Analysis on Big Five Sub-dimensions
Résumé
: Handwriting and Drawing are functional tasks involving physical and cognitive
processes. Recently they have been investigated for detecting cognitive and motor
disorders. In this work, handwriting/drawing features are investigated for identifying
connections with personality traits. For this purpose, an experiment comprising seven
handwriting/drawing tasks has been administrated to 78 young adults (mean age=24.6 ±
2.4 years) equally balanced by gender. Handwriting and Drawing activities - both on and
close to the paper – had been recorded online through a digitizing tablet able to measure
handwriting and drawing features such as pressure, speed, dimension, and inclination of each pen-stroke on the paper. Participants were asked to fill the Big Five Personality
Questionnaire (BFQ) and according to the scores obtained for each of the 5 dimensions
and 10 Big Five sub-dimensions, were partitioned into three categories: low, typical, and
high. To evaluate whether the recorded handwriting/drawing features are connected with
personality traits ANOVA repeated measures have been performed with gender and group
category (low, typical, and high) as between and the listed handwriting/drawing features as
within factors. The analyses show significant differences among low, typical and, high BFQ
scores for the main Big Five dimensions and the ten Big Five sub-dimensions, indicating
that personality traits can be revealed by a quantitative analysis of the proposed
handwriting/drawing features.