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