Another Professional Perspective on Inside Out 2 Emotions: Blog #3
by Norman Brown, PhD I’ve observed the typical emotions experienced and expressed by mainstream men. And I’ve studied the emotions available to both sexes as described by Silvan Tomkins, the father of modern systematic study of emotions. I’ll describe how both of these emotion systems are related to what I saw in Inside Out 2 and compare them to some of what we see in Inside Out’s 13 year-old girl. First let’s muse a bit on what those emotions would be if they were experienced by a 13 year-old boy. We can begin with the perspective of Lisa Demour Ph.D., a specialist in adolescent emotions, who was one of two consultants who helped shape the structure and behavior of the cartoon characters in the film. In an hour-long interview on You Tube called “The Science Behind Inside Out 2,” she was asked how a similar movie about a boy would look. She responded that there would be two or three policemen present to suppress some of the emotions.1 Which of the nine inborn emotions would those be? Those to be suppressed would be Sadness, Fear, Anxiety, Embarrassment and probably Nostalgia. Nostalgia is inactive but vigilant in the movie, as a little old lady who could write memoirs much later in life. That means that the boy film needs five policemen to keep teen boys from being as emotionally expressive and potentially aware of as girls.1 And most surprising, joy herself, heroine of the girls film, is gradually being reduced from boisterous teenage horsing around to what men would enjoy mainly under the influence of alcohol or drugs. This kind of enjoyment risks injury and criminal prosecution, and that calls for both police and doctors to contain.2 Males seem like a threatened species with six out of ten ways of feeling presented in the movie suppressed, limited, or altered. Others are completely overlooked. There’s also one highlighted moment in the movie that is particularly different between girls and boys: One of the sweetest moments is part of the climax when Riley apologizes to her old girlfriends for avoiding and disrespecting them. A boy will almost never apologize to another boy unless they are guilt-tripped and/or forced to by an adult. Yet if an angry clash of wills or fists reaches a climax and then subsides, an intense friendship may follow. I’ve read dozens of stories by college students during over twenty years of teaching psychology of relationships who got into the principal’s office after a fight and became best friends with the other guy without ever understanding why. Similar intense friendships grow quickly on battlefields, though the new buddies aren’t enemies at first. In fact, a major contribution in the development of love and intimate relationships comes from an underground layer of intense emotions arising like a geyser, where they may fester awhile, still misunderstood. Another twenty-year-old student in the same class, after reviewing his romantic relationship history, came to a surprising conclusion: “All those fun-and-good-sex relations I’ve had just blew away with the wind. It was the ones with trouble at the start that lasted, even if the rough parts kept happening. That doesn’t make sense, but that’s what’s been happening.” To understand this, we’ll examine the works of the founder of modern emotional science whose main contributions were published in four volumes between 1962 and his death in 1991. Some of the fundamental inborn emotions he understood as well as how they work have been inadequately studied by most of the scientists who’ve come afterwards, including those scientists behind Inside Out #1 and #2. In our next blog we’ll explain some of these surprisingly novel understandings that could have added to the world’s most wildly popular emotional manifestos of today. 1. Dr. Demour appears in an hour-long interview, The Science Behind Inside Out 2, Greater Good Science Center, online. 2. Research shows that what’s called “co-rumination” among girls from the third grade into adolescence is far more prevalent than among boys (eg Rose, AJ 2003, online). Co-rumination is a fancy word for talking about unpleasant situations and relationships, which also includes “negative” emotions and naturally leads to not only closer relationships for girls, but also greater familiarity and facility with those difficult emotions and greater frequency of reported “emotional problems.” That’s what these Inside Out movies are about. 3. Research from hunter-gatherers to contemporary men shows that males, especially adolescent boys, are far more likely to engage in risk-taking than females (chronicled in Joyce Benenson, Warriors and Worriers, 2014).
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