Pixar’s beloved film, Inside Out 2, follows Riley as she navigates peer pressure and puberty, but how accurate are the psychological aspects of the animated film?
Pixar first released Inside Out in 2015, receiving critical praise for its raw approach to children’s emotional turmoil, and nine years later, the sequel follows the protagonist through high school and the arrival of four new emotions.
Inside Out 2 arrived on Disney Plus for the first time this week, following its debut in June, when it broke box office records and grossed more than $1 billion in the first 19 days of its release, the fastest ever for a movie. animated movie. .
The production team consulted with numerous psychologists to ensure they accurately described the telltale signs of the four new emotions in Riley’s teenage brain: anxiety, envy, shame, and boredom (a feeling of boredom or dissatisfaction).
Psychologists analyzed the emotional issues presented in Inside Out 2 to ensure they were presented accurately.
Envy is depicted as a starry-eyed blue character who just wants to be included.
Psychologists have pored over studies on whether experiences like shame are an emotion and whether there is a physiological process involved.
Humans experience 20 emotions on a regular basis, but the writers of Inside Out 2 were asked to focus only on the new, five main emotions from the first film: joy, fear, sadness, anger and disgust.
Watching Riley go from a 13-year-old in the first film to a 15-year-old in high school in the sequel is “surprisingly accurate, especially if you look at it from the perspective of what it feels like for the teenager.” and for the family’, according to Clinical psychologist Lisa Damour.
“So (Riley) goes to bed one night and she’s a girl, and then the puberty alarm goes off on the console,” said NPR.
A team of clinical psychologists was brought in to determine what each emotion would be like if given a form and how each one manifests itself.
When analyzing shame, they first had to consider whether it was really an emotion and whether it had a distinct expression that could be incorporated into a character.
Dr. Dacher Keltner said TIME who determined yes and then considered whether it has a physiological process, whether the emotion is presented externally.
Keltner, a neuroscientist who taught human emotions at Berkeley for 30 years, confirmed that it does, in the form of blushing, when the face turns red after experiencing extreme embarrassment.
“Shame is an emotion within a social context that protects the norms that keep people in groups,” Dr. Keltner said.
‘If you violate a social norm, you blush, and that blush makes people forgive you. It tells people that you are aware of social norms, that you know you made a mistake and that you are sorry.”
Keltner was asked what emotions should be included in the film and quickly came up with 20, but was told that artistically it wouldn’t be possible and they had to limit them.
Shame (right) was added as an important part of reaching the stages of puberty and interacting with the opposite sex.
The team decided to add envy to the repertoire of emotions Riley goes through, and while it can be described as wanting things that other people have, Pixar took a different stance.
“There is new research out of Europe that differentiates a type of malicious envy (perhaps undermining someone’s work or gossiping about them to try to bring them down) with a more benign form of envy in which the envious person works harder.” hard to earn that reward,’ Dr. Keltner told TIME.
‘That kind of envy can be a really good thing and something that produces great effects. In the film, envy is not a villain and they were very careful to draw her that way.”
Instead, Envy is a little blue character with big shiny eyes and an adorable personality.
Anxiety was the most difficult to portray because Pixar had to take a serious emotion and paint it in a way suitable for children.
Unlike fear, anxiety projects what could go wrong in the future instead of what is happening now and changes the way we perceive threats.
“Having a little cartoon character that embodies all of those feelings is really cool for kids to see,” Dr. Keltner told TIME.
‘I can’t tell you how many parents said, ‘My little one loves that Anger character!’ “It looks exactly how my son feels.”
Research has shown that children who have experienced mental instability in their youth, such as bullying, are more likely to develop depression and anxiety.
Riley experiences these emotions during her important soccer game while feeling overwhelmed with anxiety, bringing her to the brink of a panic attack.
“As psychologists, we see anxiety as an important, valuable, protective and natural human emotion,” Damour told NPR.
“We consider this to be a healthy version, which is the one that accurately anticipates what could go wrong, having the right reaction and the right reaction force.”
“And in terms of its relationships with the other feelings, I think over the course of the evolution of the movie, it went from being kind of a bad guy on the outside to being treated as it should be: as an uncomfortable but valuable emotion.”
Annie Wright, a trauma therapist, said Psychology today that the football scene alone “will probably be eerily familiar to any of us living with anxiety outright and/or as a result of our traumatic histories.”
Anxiety was one of the best represented, showing the nerves that arise when we worry about worst-case scenarios.
Pixar included Ennui, which means boredom in French, to explain the emotional habit teenagers have of rolling their eyes and appearing detached.
Ennui was the last emotion added to Inside Out 2 and is indicative of the typical responses seen in teenagers every day: eye rolling, attitude, and disregard for rules.
‘Boredom tells you when you should do something different. “Boredom teaches you what matters to you,” Dr. Keltner said.
The only downside to an otherwise factual film was the timeline in which these more advanced emotions emerged.
According to the Healthy Kids OrganizationHowever, emotions like anxiety, shame, and envy can appear much earlier than they were portrayed in the film, closer to Riley’s age in the first Inside Out.
This emotion “often begins in the years immediately preceding puberty”, not at the same time as puberty hits, as described in Inside Out 2.
Timeline aside, though: The overall theme of the emotions Riley felt and her reactions to them were iconically on point, Wright said.