Inside Out Psychology

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1. The Movie “Inside out” is about a 11-year old girl named Riley, who is has to move away from her life in the Midwest when her dad starts a new job in San Francisco. The movie focuses on Riley’s emotions, Joy – the leader, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, and how they guide her through this difficult time. The emotions live in the Headquarters inside Riley’s mind, where they help to advise her in everyday life. Joy tries to keep Sadness away from Riley’s memory’s in order to prevent her from making them sad, but when Joy, and Sadness are taken away from headquarters, the other emotions must try to keep things in control. While trying to make their way back to headquarters Joy comes to realizes that Sadness in not just useful, but necessary …show more content…

Inside out has a lot of psychological content including the Universality hypothesis. The universal hypothesis that human experiences the same basic 6 emotions, anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise, its applies to this this movie in that the emotions in the headquarters of Riley’s mind are 5 of those 6 emotions. Another psychological aspect in this movies would be memory encoding. The is a lot of encoding going on throughout the movie, and showing of how some memories are stronger than others, thus contributing to our personalities. As wells as that other memories are transmitted to our long term memories and many end up being forgotten. We see this memory encoding when Joy and Sadness are taken out of headquarters as well as within headquarters when memories are being form. There’s also aspects of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs being incorporating into this movie. When Riley starts to fight with her parents, especially her dad, her belongingness and love needs suffer preventing her from fulfilling her esteem and self-actualization needs. I also notice the Canon Bard theory when Disgust sees the broccoli it triggers Riley to feel disgust and say “ew”. Another thing that I notice in the movie was the facial feedback theory, when Riley is starting her first day at her new school although she is nervous, she out a smile on her face and this makes her feel confident going into school, show how emotional expression can cause the emotion they signify. The main way I was …show more content…

The main thing that stood out to me from this film was how Joy was attempt to keep sadness away for Riley’s memories and not realizing the importance of Sadness in Riley life. By preventing Riley from experiencing sadness, Joy inadvertently made the transition of the move harder on Riley. Since Riley wasn’t able to express how she was feeling she wasn’t able get that emotional support from her parents that she needed. When Joy finally realise the importance of Sadness and allowed her to control the panel, Riley was able to express how she’s been feeling with her parents and start to feel better. This stood out to because I think a lot of the times we forget how important all our emotions are for our mental functioning including sadness. As we discussed in class, it is necessary for us to experience sadness not only to experience other emotions, but also because sadness allows us to feel empathy and etc. for others, so I do think this portrayal of Sadness being very important to be accurate. I was really encouraged by this movie because it was exploring these ideas of validating all our emotions, and I think that concept of accepting our emotions is something more people need to be aware of. For me personally, this movie made me feel empathetic towards riley because I could relate to her situation of moving away from her friends. I also felt happy at the end of the movie when Riley was finally able to express to her parents how she had been

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