Science Of Sadness And Joy: ‘Inside Out’ Gets Childhood Emotions Right

NPR:

Hollywood’s version of science often asks us to believe that dinosaurs can be cloned from ancient DNA (they can’t), or that the next ice age could develop in just a few days (it couldn’t).

But Pixar’s film Inside Out is an animated fantasy that remains remarkably true to what scientists have learned about the mind, emotion and memory.

The film is about an 11-year-old girl named Riley who moves from her happy home in Minnesota to the West Coast, where she has no friends and pizza is made with broccoli. Much of the film is spent inside Riley’s mind, which features a control center manned by five personified emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.

“I think they really nailed it,” says Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley who worked as a consultant to the filmmakers.

…

As the filmmakers were working, they would fire off emails to Keltner and to Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the study of emotions. The process helped create a movie that’s true to the underlying science when it shows things like how emotions tend to color Riley’s perception of the world.

Read the whole story: NPR