(VICE VERSA)
“Inside out” is an animated film from the Disney studios that will be released in 2015. It is an American film that lasts 94 minutes. The computer graphics were directed by Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen. “Inside out” is a film set in the mind of Riley, an 11-year-old girl born in Minnesota. The film takes place in Riley’s brain where her emotions are represented by small characters: Joy, Sadness in blue, Fear in purple, Disgust in green and Wrath in red. As the character grows up, his experiences become memories colored by the emotion attached to them. These memories are then sent to long-term memory each night. As for Riley’s story, it begins with a move to San Francisco, which saddens her greatly, and a whole host of events follow that cause changes in Riley’s brain. In other words, the film is about seeing the evolution of Riley’s mind as she grows up.
In 2016, this film won the Oscar for best animated film and for good reason! Indeed, this film is not a simple cartoon, it proposes, through a simple story, to explain the main lines of human psychic functioning, by evoking certain psychological notions such as emotions, memory, psychic reshuffling at the beginning of adolescence etc…
So here are a few points of reference on the links between what this film is about and what we know about the brain.
The main hypothesis of the film is that we are governed by our emotions.
Indeed, as explained above, Riley’s emotions are represented by small characters in his head that govern Riley’s life in the Control Center.
The choice made by the directors regarding the type of emotions is no coincidence. The choice is based on the description of the emotions made by the American psychologist Paul Ekman. Paul Ekman established a list of basic emotions in 1970 based on people’s facial expressions. It should be noted that one of the emotions described by Ekman does not appear in the film: surprise. Co-director Ronnie Del Carmen explains this decision: “We removed it because we felt it was too close to fear in terms of physical characteristics.
The film also reminds us that no emotion is good or bad in itself: fear can prevent us from acting but it also keeps us safe from danger, anger can harm ourselves and others but ensures that justice prevails, disgust can make us feel unpleasant sensations but makes us move away from certain things that could harm us, and sadness which is often linked to negativity but which yet in the film ends up creating an inseparable couple with joy.
All these emotions are constantly interacting in Riley’s brain, and we can see that these interactions are not always functional. Indeed, as soon as one emotion takes over too much, disasters happen (example of anger in the film). This refers to emotional regulation, a concept widely studied in psychology, notably by James Gross. According to him, emotional regulation is composed of a set of processes centered on the emotional antecedents which ensures an emotional evaluation and organizes the choice of the response to be given. This is related to the second major concept addressed in the film: long-term memory.
Emotions seem to be directly connected to memory in the film, we are shown how our emotions are linked to our experience. We can see that certain situations generate certain emotions in Riley, sometimes pleasant and sometimes not. And this is again a process explained in psychology, we now know that our memories are associated with emotions, and that the stronger the emotion, the more the memory is anchored. More commonly, we call this the “Madeleine of Proust”. This also demonstrates that the range of our emotions is subjective because it is linked to our personal history, as can be seen in the representation of emotions in the heads of Riley’s parents.
The film also evokes the storage of memories and the location of memory. For a long time, researchers thought that memory was localized in a specific place in the brain, but the latest research shows that memory is everywhere, which is well shown in the film thanks to all the memories stored in all the convolutions of Riley’s brain. Nevertheless, a nuance can be brought, in the film we have the impression that the memories are stored like in drawers and that we can choose as we wish to go and select them. But neuroscientists show us that they are rather reconstructed, we don’t choose to go looking for a memory, we see something that evokes that memory and there, the memory is reconstructed. It is therefore a rather old representation of the storage of memories in this film.
One last point also evoked in the film, is when Riley’s memories are sent to long-term memory at night, and indeed, it is shown that our memory consolidates more efficiently during sleep and that a lack of sleep can lead to memory problems. Since the 1950s, it has been proven that the night is a time of intense brain activity and Michael Zugaro published a study in 2016 proving that a dialogue does take place at night between the hippocampus and the cortex during the repetitive deep slow wave sleep phase, knowing that the dialogue between these two areas is at the origin of memory consolidation.
“Inside out” is therefore a very interesting film psychologically, with an explanation of emotions based on real scientific research. Obviously, the film only takes up the main lines and remains accessible to all audiences, which sometimes makes the explanation of certain processes a bit simplistic. Nevertheless, it remains interesting and educational, especially for explaining emotions to children!
Words that I learned : psychic reshuffling at the beginning of adolescence : remaniement psychique à l’adolescence / anchored : ancré / the range of : une palette de / hippocampus : hippocampe / all audiences : tout public.