The beloved Pixar film, Inside Out 2, follows Riley as she navigates social pressure and puberty, but how accurate are the psychological aspects of the animated film?
Pixar first released Inside Out in 2015, receiving critical acclaim for its raw approach to the emotional turmoil of children and nine years later, the sequel follows the protagonist into high school and the arrival of four new emotions.
Inside Out 2 made its way to Disney Plus for the first time this week, following its debut in June when it broke box office records and brought in more than $1 billion in the first 19 days of its release – the fastest ever for an animated film.
The production team consulted with numerous psychologists to ensure they accurately depicted the tell-tale signs of the four new emotions in Riley’s teenage brain: anxiety, envy, embarrassment and ennui – a feeling of boredom or dissatisfaction.
Psychologists weighed in on the emotional issues presented in Inside Out 2 to make sure they were accurately presented
Envy is depicted as a starry-eyed blue character who just wants to be included
Psychologists pored over studies about whether experiences like embarrassment are an emotion and if there’s a physiological process involved.
Humans experience 20 emotions on a regular basis, but the Inside Out 2 screenwriters were told to focus on just the new ones and five primary emotions from the first film – joy, fear, sadness, anger and disgust.
Watching Riley go from an adolescent 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 is a kid, and then the puberty alarm rings on the console,’ she told NPR.
A team of clinical psychologists were brought on board to determine what each emotion would look like if it was given a form and how each one manifests itself.
When looking at embarrassment, they first had to consider whether it was really an emotion and whether it has a distinct expression that could be built into a character.
Dr Dacher Keltner told TIME that they determined it did and then considered if it has a physiological process – if the emotion outwardly presents itself.
Keltner, a neuroscientist who taught human emotion at Berkeley for 30 years, confirmed that it did, in the form of blushing – when your face reddens after suffering from extreme embarrassment.
‘Embarrassment is an emotion within a social context that protects the norms that hold 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’re aware of social norms, you know you made a mistake, and you’re sorry.’
Keltner was consulted on what emotions should be included in the film, and promptly said 20, but was told that artistically, it wouldn’t be possible and they had to narrow it down.
Embarrassment (right) was added as a major part of hitting the stages of puberty and interacting with the opposite sex
The team settled on adding envy to the repertoire of emotions Riley goes through, and while it can be depicted as wanting things other people have, Pixar took a different stance.
‘There’s new research coming out of Europe that differentiates a malicious sort of envy—maybe you undermine someone’s work or you gossip about them to try to bring them down—with a more benign form of envy where the envious person works harder to earn that reward,’ Dr Keltner told TIME.
‘That kind of envy can be a really good thing and something that produces great effects. Envy in the film isn’t a villain, and they took great care to draw her that way.’
Instead, envy is a small blue character with big sparkling eyes and an adorable personality.
Anxiety was the most difficult to represent because Pixar had to take a serious emotion and paint it in a way that would be suitable for children.
Unlike fear, anxiety projects what could go wrong in the future rather than what’s happening now and shifts the way we perceive threats.
‘Having a little cartoon character that embodies all those feelings is so good for kids to see,’ Dr Keltner told TIME.
‘I can’t tell you the number of parents who said, ‘My little guy loves that Anger character! He looks just like my kid feels.”
Research has shown that children who have suffered from mental instability in their younger years like bullying have a higher chance of developing depression and anxiety.
Riley experiences these emotions during her important soccer scrimmage as she becomes overwhelmed with anxiety, leading her to the edge of a panic attack.
‘As psychologists, we see anxiety as an important, valuable, protective and natural human emotion,’ Damour told NPR.
‘We see it as having a healthy version, which is the kind that is accurately anticipating what could go wrong, having the right reaction to it, having the right strength of reaction.
‘And so in terms of her relationships with the other feelings, I think that over the evolution of the film, she went from being sort of a bad guy on the outside to being treated as she should – as an uncomfortable but valuable emotion.’
Annie Wright, a trauma therapist, told Psychology Today that the soccer scene alone ‘will likely be hauntingly familiar for any of us who live with anxiety full-stop and/or as a result of our trauma histories.’
Anxiety was one of the most well represented, showing the nerves that arise when we worry about the worst-case scenarios
Pixar included Ennui, which means boredom in French, to explain the emotional habit teenagers have of rolling their eyes and seeming unattached
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 a contempt for the rules.
‘Boredom tells you when you should do something different. Boredom teaches you what matters to you,’ Dr Keltner said.
The only downfall to an otherwise factual film was the timeline for when these more advanced emotions hit.
According to the Healthy Children Organization, emotions like anxiety, embarrassment and envy can actually set in much earlier than they were portrayed in the film, more akin to Riley’s age in the first Inside Out.
This emotion ‘often starts in the years right before puberty,’ not at the same time as puberty hits, as was depicted in Inside Out 2.
However, timeline aside: the overarching theme of the emotions Riley felt, and her reactions to them, were iconically spot on, Wright said.
