Basic Emotions — Thoughts and Reflections about Pixar’s Inside Out
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Since it is always late in the night, my laziness kicks in and, by now, I watched the movie something like ten times over the last month.
I’ve always appreciated it, but watching it over and over again made me notice several small details, points of reflection, that caught my attention and pushed me to do some research and put it into a series of analysis articles.
DISCLAIMER Everything you’re going to read is either contextually provided with the source of information or just my brain juice. In any case, remember that this analysis is just my interpretation and opinion.
Even if it’s difficult to spoil a movie from 10 years ago, it’s not impossible: if you didn’t watch the movie, you HAVE to! It’s a Pixar masterpiece. Moreover, the article ahead is full of spoilers.
Basic emotions
The main characters are the so-called basic emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. In theory, the basic emotions are more. The American psychologist Paul Elkman provided a scientific consultancy to the production of the movie. He is the father of a theory of six basic emotions, including the previous five, plus the Surprise.
Many successive theories expanded this list up to 8, but for the sake of simplicity, they just kept it to a minimum.
The association with colour is — in my opinion — arbitrary or somewhat related to folklore: feeling “blue”, turning “red with anger”, the puking emoji is green … but what’s interesting is the fact that, according to these theories, emotions combine (like colours) to form more complex ones.
The movie gives us a moving example of this when Joy and Sadness are combined in nostalgic memory.
Someone tried to evaluate all the possible combinations of the basic Five, here is a funny chart by Christophe Haubursin. According to that work, it seems that:
- Joy+Sadness = Melancholy
- Joy+Rage = Righteousness (I would have said Grit)
- Joy+Disgust = Intrigue (like in fetishes?)
- Joy+Fear = Surprise (maybe Excitement?)
- Sadness+Rage = Betrayal
- Sadness+Disgust = Self-Loathing
- Sadness+Fear = Anxiety (perfectly matched, hideous beast this one)
- Rage+Disgust = Loathing
- Rage+Fear = Hatred (racism is a perfect example)
The Emotion’s Purpose
A simple explanation of the purpose of the emotions is also provided in the first minutes when
- Fear is presented as the one protecting Riley from “dangers”,
- Disgust from “poisoning” (literally: both “physically and socially”, bravo to the writers)
- Anger from “injustice”.
That’s rather simplistic but very appreciable. Joy doesn’t talk about her purpose and does not understand Sadness’ one.
Anger is a response to a perceived provocation, hurt or threat. It makes the blood flow more to the arms and increases the adrenaline levels making us ready to fight (verbally or physically), the movie explains it rather well.
Fear, on the other hand, is a response to a perceived danger and triggers self-preservation mechanisms.
Finally, Disgust preserves us from coming in contact with offensive foods that may cause harm to the organism or anything related to “disease” (faeces, urine, bodily fluids…).
If these were well explained and also easy to understand, when it comes to Joy and Sadness, things complex up.
According to Paul Elkman, Sadness is a message for the members of the social group, signalling the need for assistance, and comfort. The movie here is superb: one of Riley’s happiest memory is celebrating with family and friends… a defeat in an important hockey match! The support from family and friends is a credit to Sadness taking control, making Riley feel sad, crying even, and attracting the love from the parents and friends.
Joy, happiness. Well, this is a never-ending cycle. We experience Joy when something positive happens to us or, more importantly, if we do something with positive effects on us. This includes an enormous variety of activities, from fulfilling our biological needs (strongly related to our senses) to achieving results. Happiness is great and, of course, we want more and more. The beautiful feeling of Joy is a reward our brain grants for doing something positive (to us). In this way, like a sort of addiction mechanism, we are prone to do it again, and again…
All in all, if all other feelings are a brake to us in front of negative effects, Joy pushes us to (what are considered to be) positive ones.
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