Pixar’s Mood Master

The Atlantic:

In 1943, Disney released an eight-minute film titled Reason and Emotion. The film personified the ability to think and the ability to feel as, respectively, a bespectacled, suit-wearing prig and an impulsive, lascivious caveman. “Within the mind of each of us,” intoned the narrator, “these two wage a ceaseless battle” for control of the (in the film, quite literal) mental steering wheel.

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He pared down the possibilities with the help of two psychologists: Paul Ekman, whose pioneering work on facial expressions inspired the Fox series Lie to Me, and Ekman’s protégé Dacher Keltner, of UC Berkeley. Ekman and Keltner are leaders in what is known as “basic emotion theory,” arguably the dominant theory in the study of emotions. The theory, which has its roots in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, posits that certain emotions are universal, evolutionarily determined, and functionally discrete. Keltner told me that he was deeply impressed by Docter’s team. He’d assumed they’d have relatively narrow questions (“What shade of green should Disgust be?”). Instead, he found himself in an ongoing conversation about the relationship between emotion and consciousness, the tensions among different emotions, and how emotions live on in memory.

Keltner also said he believed that Inside Out—which he and Ekman had recently seen—could change cultural notions of emotion for the better.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic