00:00One of these emotions shouldn't be in Inside Out.
00:03If you look at the science, the real-world psychology,
00:06and find the best models to fit an adult brain,
00:08yeah, this wouldn't be how it looks.
00:10And one of these emotions is getting demoted.
00:15Hello, internet, welcome to Film Theory,
00:19Do you ever look at someone and wonder
00:20what is going on inside their head?
00:22So, in a year where we've desperately
00:24needed a box office hit,
00:25I'm not sure anyone expected Pixar to come along
00:28and be the heavy hitters with Inside Out 2.
00:30This is a studio that has struggled
00:32with all of its releases since the pandemic,
00:34but Inside Out 2, it's the fastest an animated movie
00:37has ever hit a billion dollars,
00:38and it's not slowing down.
00:40Also, can I ask, is it weird
00:42that all of the successful animation recently
00:44has put its main characters through panic attacks?
00:46Like, Anxiety has one here, Puss in Boots had one,
00:49Spider-Man had one, Mario basically had one.
00:52Maybe we're making these movies too hashtag relatable.
00:55If you don't know, Inside Out is all about
00:57the emotions inside of the head of a girl named Riley.
01:00Joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger.
01:03Together, they basically pilot Riley,
01:05helping her navigate her life
01:06and appropriately react to the situations
01:08put in front of her.
01:09Riley, hey, here comes an airplane.
01:13Oh, airplane, we got an airplane, everybody.
01:16While also keeping track of and organizing her memories.
01:19Memories are represented by glass balls,
01:22each glowing a color that corresponds
01:24to what type of memory it is.
01:25A happy memory, like watching WALL-E for the first time,
01:28it's yellow, like joy.
01:29But a sad memory, like watching Madame Web for the first time,
01:32it's blue, like sadness, et cetera, et cetera.
01:35But with Inside Out 2, Riley has grown a bit older
01:38and has now hit puberty, and you know what that means.
01:40A whole host of new, more complex emotions
01:43beyond the first five are introduced.
01:45For this movie, we have anxiety, envy,
01:48embarrassment, and ennui,
01:49that's boredom for us non-French speakers,
01:51with the hint that there are plenty of more emotions to come.
01:54A joke in the film has an emotion called nostalgia show up,
01:57though she's about 10 years too early
01:59and shouldn't be getting to Riley's head until her 20s.
02:01Remember when we all finally came up to headquarters?
02:05That was like 30 seconds ago nostalgia.
02:08But in the theater, this whole setup
02:09got my theorist cogs a-turnin',
02:11so new emotions are showing up as Riley ages,
02:14and there are more on the way?
02:16For me, this really started to beg the question,
02:18is this what would actually happen?
02:20Yeah, today we're doing one of those classic,
02:22how right was the movie theories, and asking
02:25how accurate is Inside Out?
02:27If we wanted to take a look at real world psychology
02:29and make a scientifically real version of Inside Out,
02:32what would the emotions in Riley's head actually be?
02:35And more importantly, using that knowledge,
02:37what would come next for the Inside Out franchise?
02:40Yeah, this movie made a billion dollars in two weeks,
02:42they're not not gonna be making an Inside Out 3, 4, 5,
02:45maybe a 6, I see you Disney, I know you.
02:48Well, after doing the research, let me tell you,
02:50things are about to get way, way bigger for Inside Out,
02:53and if they follow the psychology,
02:55one of these emotions might be out of a job.
02:57So loyal theorists, let's get all in our feelings
03:01First things first, if we're talking about
03:03how scientifically accurate things in this film are,
03:06obviously we don't have a council of emotions
03:08driving our bodies from a control panel
03:10like a giant mech suit.
03:11Our brains are mushy and gooey
03:13and much more complicated than that,
03:15and sometimes emotions aren't even the ones
03:17in the pilot seat at all.
03:18Often, our actions come from central cognition,
03:21that's the part of the brain that operates
03:23thinking and reasoning,
03:24and often comes into conflict with how we're feeling.
03:27However, the point of this theory is to try to keep things
03:29to the premise of Inside Out,
03:31these conflicting emotions inside of Riley's head
03:33deciding what the best thing for her is to do.
03:36So we are gonna keep that intact
03:37and just apply that to other real models of emotions
03:40created by real world science and psychology.
03:42Just wanted to make sure that was clarified
03:45To answer the question of how scientifically accurate
03:48Inside Out is, we first need to figure out
03:50just how many emotions people have.
03:51But there's a bit of a problem with that.
03:54Yeah, no one can really seem to agree
03:56on just how many emotions there are.
03:58Charles Darwin, yeah, the evolution guy,
04:00mapped out a full 34 emotions.
04:02The list's on screen, I am not saying all of these out loud.
04:05However, Rene Descartes classified
04:07the six primary passions to be wonder, love, hate,
04:10desire, joy, and sadness.
04:13But then if we go all the way back to Aristotle,
04:15he believed that all emotions could be traced
04:17to pleasure and pain or some combination
04:21As you can tell, actually figuring out
04:22what emotions there even are is surprisingly challenging,
04:25something that Pixar themselves also discovered
04:27while making the movie.
04:28The director of the first film, Pete Docter,
04:30said that they were surprised at the disagreement
04:32in the scientific community about this
04:34and that there were versions of Inside Out
04:36that had as many as 26 emotions early on.
04:39So how did they get these two dozen or so
04:41down to the ones we saw in the first movie,
04:43joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger?
04:45Well, those actually follow some real world research.
04:49In 1980, Professor Robert Plutchik
04:51of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
04:53developed the Plutchik Wheel,
04:54which defined the core emotions as ecstasy, admiration,
04:58terror, amazement, grief, loathing, rage, and vigilance.
05:02This was then later narrowed down even further
05:04by psychologist Paul Ekman to joy, sadness, fear,
05:08disgust, anger, and surprise.
05:10If that list sounds familiar, it should.
05:12Ekman was actually a scientific consultant on Inside Out
05:15and helped develop the cast.
05:17But already, I'm sure you're seeing
05:18some missing characters here.
05:20Surprise and amazement, which are kind of the same thing,
05:23are in both models, while admiration and vigilance
05:25from Plutchik's circle are nowhere to be seen.
05:28Gotta say, there are some missed opportunities here
05:30for fun characters, like I'm imagining surprise
05:32would just be like a shocked Pikachu meme
05:34just hanging out in headquarters all day.
05:36And what would a vigilance character look like?
05:37Like some guy in a suit of armor
05:39or like a paranoid dude with binoculars across the street?
05:43We were robbed, Pixar, robbed!
05:45Regardless, that's what Pixar used as a basis
05:47for both Inside Out and its sequel.
05:49But these six to eight emotions seem a bit limiting
05:52to express yourself, don't they?
05:54Humans are able to feel some pretty weird,
05:57complicated emotions that don't really boil down
05:59to just joy or fear or whatever, right?
06:02And because we want to see just how a scientifically
06:04accurate Inside Out would look,
06:05I started diving deeper into further studies
06:08and research about emotions to see what more we could find.
06:11And believe it or not, but I actually found a lot more
06:14in Pletchik's work that represents
06:15these more complex emotions.
06:17See, the Pletchik wheel is a bit more complicated
06:20than it looks at first glance because of a system
06:22between the spokes of the wheel called dyads.
06:24Basically, Pletchik believed that when two emotions
06:27are felt together, they create a new sub-emotion
06:29that's sort of a mix of the two.
06:31For example, when you feel both joy and anger,
06:33that would become pride.
06:35Fear and disgust would fusion dance to become shame.
06:38Joy and sadness would collab on bitter sweetness.
06:41And hey, that last one is something represented
06:44At the end of the first movie, we see joy and sadness
06:47share one of Riley's childhood memories
06:49and it becomes both blue and yellow.
06:52That previously happy memory is now bittersweet
06:55because it's part of a past that Riley has lost.
06:58So that's a bit of a win for the movie here.
07:00Though again, I'd love to see them try to design
07:03a character that was called bittersweetness.
07:05Like what would dad look like?
07:06Maybe someone permanently stuck in like a smile cry?
07:09So yeah, on the face of it, if we stick to the Pletchik wheel
07:12and the Ekman model, there's not a whole lot of deviation
07:15we need to make a fully accurate Inside Out.
07:17We just need a couple extra main emotions
07:20and then more representations of these dyads.
07:22However, I have to ask, after doing a bunch of research
07:26into the different ideas and models
07:28behind how we feel emotions,
07:30is the Pletchik wheel really the best thing we can do
07:33to really represent our scientifically accurate Inside Out?
07:36Are these emotions that Ekman chose
07:39really the best ones to show off
07:40the complex, wide range of human feeling?
07:43As someone with a passion for science,
07:45I was skeptical about that.
07:47And after doing a bit of digging,
07:48I found I wasn't the only one.
07:50Turns out Ekman wasn't the only psychologist
07:53who consulted with Pixar for Inside Out.
07:55The other, Professor Dacher Keltner
07:57of the University of California, Berkeley,
07:59actually disagrees with Ekman
08:00about what is and isn't an emotion.
08:02Specifically, he pointed to love, amusement, and sympathy
08:06as hugely important emotions
08:07that didn't make the cut for the film.
08:09Now, that being said,
08:10I can see how amusement would be covered by joy.
08:13And you can sympathize with people
08:15based on what you feel, right?
08:17It's not necessarily connected to its own emotion.
08:19I mean, we literally see sadness sympathize
08:22with Bing Bong through sadness.
08:25I bet Riley liked it.
08:27We were best friends.
08:32How did you do that?
08:34He was sad, so I listened to what-
08:37Bing Bong felt sad and sadness knew what that felt like.
08:42Yeah, I think love is kind of an important emotion
08:44that isn't really covered by any of the others.
08:46You can love things that make you happy,
08:48or sad, or angry, or that you're scared of.
08:50So love really should be part of this cast of characters.
08:53Maybe it's like a Cupid-looking guy.
08:55And this goes even further with the sequel.
08:56Like, when I first saw some of the choices
08:58for the new cast in Inside Out,
09:00it kinda confused me.
09:02Like, okay, embarrassment and envy make sense, I guess.
09:06I always thought of anxiety as being more thought-based
09:10Like, your mind is racing out of control
09:12and you get desperate and need to, like,
09:13throw on some lo-fi to chill yourself out.
09:15Oh, and speaking of, if you like the lo-fi
09:17that you're listening to right now,
09:18this is actually a project that we here at Theorist made
09:22It's chill beats with a mystery hidden inside of it
09:24for all you lore nuts,
09:25so go check that out if you're interested.
09:27Anyway, based on all of my research,
09:29professionals do consider anxiety to be an emotion,
09:31so hey, you learn something new every day.
09:33But even still, anxiety seems more like a subset of fear
09:37than its own emotion, doesn't it?
09:39They even sort of talk about that in the movie
09:41and how similar fear and anxiety are.
09:43Would this actually be a character as important
09:46as we see in the movie
09:46with this much power and authority over others?
09:49And then there's Ennui.
09:50There does seem to be some disagreement
09:52within the scientific community
09:54about whether this sort of boredom is an emotion,
09:56but to me, it always seemed more like
09:57the absence of an emotion, right?
10:00Regardless, even just the fact
10:01that there was so much disagreement
10:03about the number of emotions
10:04here amongst philosophers and psychologists,
10:06even ones that worked on Inside Out,
10:08it made me pause and wonder what else
10:10other professionals had to say about the Ekman model.
10:13And after doing some digging, I found this.
10:15According to a 2023 study from Scientific Reports,
10:19the Plutchik wheel and Ekman's model have some issues
10:22when you try to apply them to the real world.
10:24They found that while Ekman's model did help people
10:27who had trouble describing problems with emotions,
10:30so stuff like, I take issue with this
10:32because it made me mad,
10:33or I don't like this because it scares me,
10:35for people who were more emotionally mature,
10:37who had a better grasp on their emotions
10:39or could detect the emotions of others,
10:41their feelings rarely lined up
10:43with Ekman or Plutchik's work.
10:45It was just too limiting or too simplistic.
10:47There wasn't enough nuance in the emotions
10:49represented by the Ekman or Plutchik models
10:52for it to actually be useful to them.
10:54So all in all, that means that having the emotions
10:56in Riley's head be based on Ekman's model
10:58would make sense for her.
11:00She's a kid, but she's still discovering her emotions
11:02and how complex they can be
11:04and feeling two conflicting emotions at the same time.
11:07Having just a couple of emotions to point to
11:09or maybe combine here or there works for her.
11:12But the older her character gets,
11:14the less it's gonna work.
11:16See, as children age,
11:17the more complex their ability to feel emotions becomes.
11:20At birth, many people believe
11:21that children can only feel joy, anger, and fear,
11:24which then expands out into others
11:26like sadness, surprise, et cetera, et cetera.
11:29But when children hit puberty,
11:30their hormones supercharge the part of their brain
11:33that allows them to feel emotions,
11:35opening the door to a lot more intense
11:36and complex feelings.
11:38And there are a lot of these different new emotions too,
11:41way more than the four that we see added in Inside Out 2.
11:44If we want a more scientifically accurate Inside Out,
11:47especially moving forward as Riley ages into adulthood,
11:51we need a better model to base these characters on,
11:53one that's more complex and offers more emotions.
11:56Thankfully, there's no shortage of these out there
11:58in the world of psychology.
12:00Now, there are plenty of wheels
12:01that offer a wider range of emotions
12:03than what Inside Out pulled from,
12:05and a lot of these would be good choices to build off of.
12:07However, the one that's the best option in my eyes,
12:10this one, the Junto Institute Emotion and Feeling Wheel.
12:13Well, this is part of the wheel.
12:15Let's zoom out a bit, shall we?
12:17There we go, that's better.
12:18The Junto Wheel is a tool
12:20that helps build self-awareness and empathy,
12:23helping people identify more complex emotions
12:25that they're feeling by starting out
12:27with what it considers the core emotions,
12:29joy, love, fear, anger, sadness, and surprise.
12:33From there, it expands outward
12:35into more specific sub-emotions of these core six.
12:38So, for example, you could be in a good mood,
12:41feeling joy or love,
12:42but if you wanted to identify a specific reason why,
12:45you expand that out into feeling something more specific,
12:48like optimism or contentedness or whatever.
12:51This wheel is often used in therapy or professional settings
12:55to identify complex feelings,
12:57and was designed to be the culmination
12:58of other similar wheels.
13:00But why would we want to use this for Inside Out
13:02moving forward over other wheels?
13:04Well, professionals often point
13:05to one of the major advantages of the Junto Wheel
13:08being that it considers love as its own emotion.
13:11As we stated earlier,
13:12that was something that one of the psychologists
13:14Pixar hired to work on Inside Out
13:16thought was a hugely important emotion
13:18that was missing from the film.
13:19Additionally, it offers the most balanced number
13:22of what I'm gonna call positive and negative emotions,
13:25whereas other wheels often skew more heavily
13:27to one side or the other.
13:28But the biggest thing that the Junto Wheel has
13:31over a model like Plutchik's,
13:32it can get very, very specific.
13:35Like, you thought this was the whole thing?
13:37Nah, man, this is the full wheel.
13:39In total, we have 108 emotions represented here
13:43and they can get very granular and complex.
13:45I also quite like the color coding on this wheel.
13:48Many of the more complex sub-emotions
13:49have shades of multiple primary emotions in them.
13:52Some of them make a lot of sense.
13:54There are shades of purple, which is anger on this chart,
13:57and emotions categorized under fear or sadness.
14:00That checks out, right?
14:01They're closer together on the wheel,
14:02and a lot of the things that can make you angry
14:04can also be sad or scary.
14:06But others are way more nuanced, right?
14:09Like, there's a tinge of yellow, which is love here,
14:12in the opposite emotion, grief.
14:14At first glance, that might not make a lot of sense,
14:16but I think Andrew Garfield put it the best
14:18when he said that grief is just love left unexpressed.
14:21Of course there'd be some yellow in there.
14:23And best of all, for our purposes today,
14:25almost all of the Inside Out emotions are present
14:28or easily slotted in.
14:29Anxiety is even a subset of fear,
14:31just like we discussed above.
14:33However, we do have to talk about
14:34the emotional elephant in the room.
14:36If we go with this model,
14:37the biggest change we're gonna have to make to Inside Out
14:39is that disgust might be out of her job.
14:41Yeah, if you look here,
14:42disgust is a subset of anger on the Junto chart,
14:45so Pixar might have to send disgust packing.
14:48Or, well, maybe not.
14:49It's more like she's gonna be getting demoted.
14:51Because if we apply this new structure to Inside Out
14:54to figure out where Inside Out's going
14:56in the next installment,
14:57what Inside Out 3 is gonna look like?
14:59Well, just like this wheel has different layers,
15:01it has a hierarchy in its emotions.
15:03That's exactly what Inside Out should be doing.
15:05A truly scientifically accurate Inside Out
15:08would be like an office complex.
15:10At the top, we'd have these bigger emotions,
15:12the head honchos, so to speak,
15:14like joy, sadness, anger, fear, love, and surprise.
15:18And then under each of them,
15:19they would have emotions directly reporting to them.
15:21This is actually where disgust would fall,
15:24reporting to anger, while other emotions
15:25like pride, optimism, shame, and disappointment
15:28would also be in this part of the structure.
15:30But then, under each of them,
15:32they would also have direct reports.
15:34Hope and eagerness would report to optimism.
15:37Guilt and regret would report to shame.
15:39So on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera.
15:42So yeah, like so much of real life,
15:44the emotions in Riley's head in Inside Out
15:46would be like an office building,
15:48complete with different departments
15:49and a bunch of bureaucracy.
15:51I wonder what human resources would be in this case.
15:54If I were a betting man,
15:55Inside Out 3 is gonna be dealing with exactly this.
15:58The more and more emotions get added to Riley's head,
16:01the more and more complex the structure's gonna become.
16:04Our core cast of emotions are gonna be getting
16:06more and more responsibilities,
16:07more and more emotions looking to them for guidance.
16:10And that's gonna add a lot of stress to them.
16:13And then, when Riley encounters
16:14the big emotional conflict of this movie,
16:16which will probably be either going to college
16:18or the death of one of her parents,
16:20things are gonna fall apart
16:21as this huge complex of emotions tries to deal with that.
16:25On paper, maybe it doesn't sound super exciting,
16:28but this is Pixar we're talking about.
16:30If anyone's gonna make me cry
16:31at a bunch of emotions filing paperwork, it's them.
16:34But hey, did you know they're making
16:35an Inside Out spinoff show for Disney Plus
16:38all about how Riley's dreams are made?
16:39It's gonna be like a little movie studio in her head,
16:41which made me wonder,
16:43how are they gonna handle teleprompters?
16:45Am I the only one who thinks about those sorts of things?
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