Emotions

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). 

By Norman Brown, Ph.D. Once initiation to womanhood (perhaps via the unmentionable experience of menarche) sets the main plot in motion, the most dynamic new character appears: the bright orange, big wide toothy-mouthed Anxiety, always hyper, with pin-ball eyes and fireworks-mohawk infecting everygirl by making everything imperfect into a problem that can’t be solved. Anxiety’s purpose is to anticipate future social dangers and make sure anything bad will get worse. In fact, she spoils Riley’s encounters with an older girl gang while alienating her old friends and foils her attempts to join the varsity ice hockey team that’s above her abilities and worsens these social catastrophes by overreacting.  Though Anxiety’s purpose is to make a mess out of every unfamiliar scene, she quickly becomes the star of this new teenage period, the antagonist to Joy’s protagonist. With Anxiety’s help, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness get stronger and the plot takes a downward turn to enter the movie underworld’s perilous life tests. Anxiety also brings her own entourage of characters, all of them negative. First there’s Ennui who slumps over, a limp dark purple balloon oozing out her life-force with eyes barely open as slits. Ennui and Anxiety team up to promote not knowing how to act to please the older girls and not trust either parents or her old friends. Ennui isolates herself and lies in a hammock or couch in listless boredom, not finishing anything she starts and gazing back at the dwindling past. The twinkle in Joy’s Tinkerbelle sputters at the edge of giving herself up.  Along comes blue-green Envy smaller in stature than the rest. For she’s gazing with overflowing pupils at the larger-than-life statuesque figure of Valentina, admiring and wishing to be just like her—is she yearning but not trying? She seems entranced but  not able to act, contemptuous towards anyone inclined to look, but nobody does. She has nothing to offer but unhelpful criticism. But Embarrassment has a massively oversized body; he’s the shy, well-intentioned unhappy fat boy from everybody’s high school, unable to hide in his faded grey oversize hoodie. His whole pudgy face and bulbous nose blush rosy, and he tries to hide his eyes every time that something challenging happens but can’t keep from looking anyway. When he finally turns his hulking back on us, his oversized hoodie and slumping pants leave an inch-high slice of uncovered skin revealing his butt-crack. This closing surprise triggers our own embarrassing suppressed laughter, enlarging the silent embarrassment we all share to a crescendo as piercing as every adolescent girl might dread. Anxiety is the most dynamic adversary by far, pushing the action ever forward. She intensifies the tension between Riley and Valentina’s older hockey team and girl-gang. Later on Anxiety whips up a hurricane that knows no bounds and even invades the usually protected headquarters of her carrier’s brain. Taking over everywhere inside, she hurls and whirls all of the stable fixtures against the control tower’s inside walls until the central console—that is her grey matter–is wiped clean of any arms and legs and the whole operating system shuts down. Joy then gathers her bedraggled band together and sets out on some confusing journeys in search of ways to restore direction and sanity in herself. In one particularly psychological adventure, Joy and emotions reach the back of her mind and manage to clamber up the loose mountain of mostly negative emotional memory-bulbs at the top. Joy’s gang is stuck there with a self-conscious and self-hating image of herself until an unspecified construction-guy aims a cannon and blows the mountain up so they can float back to some new normalcy. Joy eventually manages to restructure her emotions with some respect for each of them, whether they’re experienced as negative or positive. From a disembodied voice with godlike authority, Joy and the theater audience hear the words, “Don’t let your emotions tell you who you are.” Now if I were an ordinary college-educated man, I’d think that sounds like a metaphor for the 18th century Enlightenment or a lightning bolt from a graphic novel. I’d also wonder who taught Joy how to rearrange and regulate the other emotions and how she developed the skills and wisdom to act adroitly and firmly to remake her personality so quickly. I’d suspect there was a mighty wise therapist on her shoulder or a new AI deity fumbling with the machinery behind the scenery.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              If I was an ordinary man-in-the-street, I’d think the best way to get rid of that nasty pile of memory-bulbs is to get an AR-15 and blast away at everyone around me. I’d know all women are insecure, hit bottom almost every week and act emotionally crazed for a bit of the days at their “time of the month.” They’re also dreamy, lazy, catty and worried they’re ugly, no matter how good they look. 

by Norman Brown Ph.D. Pixar’s Inside Out 2 opened in mid-June is now the highest grossing cartoon ever made, making 1.46 billion in its first six weeks. It’s unusual, like the first Inside Out, in that it doesn’t thrive on either violence or romance. Its tomboy heroine Riley plays on a girls’ ice hockey team in Middle School and seems to be destined for a glorious future in high school hockey until the emotional storms of puberty wreck the control panel somewhere inside her body, probably in her brain. This disastrous demolition sets off an unexpected emotional avalanche affecting all of her relationships with others. All of these are girlfriends her age or girl-gang members one or two years older, except for her parents. Of the latter, her father seems to be a goofy cheerleader, and her mother is a colorless prop who seems to be a backstage function.  Since the movie shows the nature of pre-teen and pubescent girls’ emotions, I won’t follow the plot line but explore the emotions instead, as symbolized by the characteristics and behavior of the cartoon figures. First, and most closely identified with our hero is the willowy yellow-glowing and multicolored figure of Joy, with a normal flesh-colored face on a head taller than the others that signals that she’s the leader over everyone. She usually has a buoyant, enthusiastic open-mouthed cheery smile, despite acting almost always as the decision-maker for the four other emotions in her entourage. As a many-generation offspring of the Disney imagination industry, Joy shares genetics with Tinkerbell, since she’s often radiant and apparently motivated by the pursuit of happiness for everyone. Thus it’s unsubtly shown that joyousness is the desirable path to social success, at least among women. Oddly enough, this big-smile joyousness appears now to be the winning strategy of Kamala Harris’s successful presidential campaign. Is that really natural, or just what the culture expects of women? The others always follow Joy, while occasionally expressing disagreement toward the matter at hand. First, there is Sadness, with a round pale-shadowy blue fragile-hearted face, who lets out weak sighs when the plot gets rough. She sometimes airs some doubts about what Joy wants, but always goes along with her. So Sadness also secretly symbolizes weakness, even helplessness, implying thereby that a sad female will also be weak. If I’m a man-in-the-streets reacting intuitively to this character, doesn’t that mean sadness is a weak feeling, so real men don’t get sad?     By contrast, Anger is a sputtering, all red stocky body, with a double-hump head and bulb-eyes like a Disney frog and angry intense-eyebrows and flaming spiky-hair, a hopping frustrated immature boy-bully, but usually impotently fuming. He never gets anything done. What does the little fuming frog suggest as a symbol? A boy having a temper tantrum because he’s too small to be effective and nobody ever pays attention to him. So in my every-man eyes anger never does anybody any good, and it’s certainly gets juvenile detention at any school. Fear’s pale purple body has an uncertain-gender chimney-head freaking out and wildly blowing smoke. S/he’s blabbering incoherently, in a frenzy to escape from whatever’s happening but hanging on to the others for dear life. At least Anger is ready enough to give and take a punch or two, but Fear is so unpleasant that her ungendered whole scene is just extremely shameful, and no normal human, male or female, would be caught dead feeling it unless in a Disney horror movie and already dead.  In a surprising contrast, Disgust is a slinky overdressed grass-green slippery snob in high-heels with constant negative reactions, saying “ee-uw” down her nose, recoiling from everything around and also without any impact. At least she can show us how to react to the others: with superior dismissal. So, I’d wonder, are all of these follower-feelings worthless without Joy at their head? If Riley’s the guide for how a budding adolescent girl would feel, it’s meeting every moment with an insistent cheery smile that conceals and stores her timid sadness, boiling rage, jibbering panic and quietly superior rejection. And as an everyman or boy in the streets, how should I react? Don’t believe that smiley-face. Play the same game she does, but expect volcanic drama if she’s triggered. Don’t worry, though. You can reassure and ignore her sadness, placate rage (and use flowers if she’s a grownup), reassure (and condescend to) her fearfulness and just stonewall her disgust. And now stay tuned for the second act.

Reflections on the Movie “Inside Out 2” It is actually quite wonderful that Disney’s Pixar has produced not one but two movies about the emotions given that there has been remarkable little study of emotions in the psychological literature and remarkable little awareness of emotions in our daily life, especially for men.  In our culture men are discouraged from feeling fear, surprise, sadness, joy, and especially shame/embarrassment and women are discouraged from feeling anger.   In the animated film “Inside Out 2” the main emotion that takes the lead is Joy.  The other emotions, which are fear, sadness, anger,  and disgust portrayed in “inside Out 1, here joined with anxiety, embarrassment, envy and ennui now that our central character, Riley, has entered  puberty.  All of these emotions play a role, especially anxiety, in the themes of the movie.  But one wonders if Riley were a boy, would he have as large a palate of emotions does the female Riley? Let’s imagine Riley as a male, also named Riley.  What would a typical adolescent (American) boy be like emotionally?  First, what emotion would be the lead emotion, leading all of the others?  Would it be joy?  Unlikely.  More likely it would be a more serious emotion, one with intent, perhaps interest or curiosity.  And because American culture discourages males from feeling anything that appears “weak,” the emotional palate for the male Riley would be limited.  Not a good emotional range for the main character in a movie that wants to use as many as five primary emotions (joy, sadness, fear, disgust , and anger, with the later additions of envy, ennui, embarrassment (shame) and anxiety).  Maybe only two or three of all those emotions are easily accessible to a typical adolescent boy.           Indeed, it is because she is a girl that the emotion of Joy can be the ruling emotion in the film, since women are strongly encouraged to manifest happiness/joy.  I might even go so far as to say that while boys are expected to be serious, girls are expected to be happy.  They are expected to be good at smiling…all the time.  The result of this imperative is that girls, most especially when in public, smile a lot more than they would if they were expressing their honest emotions.  If they aren’t looking happy when in public someone often will ask them if there is a problem.  As though being serious, when female, suggests she is experiencing a problem, rather than not feeling like smiling. I know something about this since I was a very serious adolescent while being female.  My home life was chaotic and unsupportive as well as impoverished and I was bright and wanted to go to college.  I knew the only way I could was with scholarships to pay the way.  However, despite my good grades, I was only rewarded a small scholarship to attend the University of California, my college of choice.  When I asked my high school counselor why I didn’t receive more financial aid, she said, “You don’t smile enough.  We don’t want someone who looks unhappy to represent our high school.” I recognized even then the discrimination in her words.  I knew the boy who had received full scholarships and he was someone who was serious all the time.  He, like me, rarely smiled. So what then is the message of the film?  Well, certainly the film was breaking new ground in that it placed emotions in the center of the action, much like real life, and showed their influence.  But it followed the biases of the culture in depicting Riley, a girl, as at the whim of her emotions, and someone whose main emotion is, or should be, joy.  In depicting joy as the leader of the girl’s emotional life, the film reinforces one of our culture’s messages to women:  If you aren’t happy then there must be something wrong with you. So smile!!

What is Emotional Versatility Training? The scientific study of emotions began with Charles Darwin who first taught that all higher mammals are driven by emotions that foster survival, reproduction and societal success. That means that all emotions help us succeed in our environment, even though over half of them feel more bad than good. In the twenty-first century, however, the ways we act on our emotions have made us a threat to our environment and ourselves. Our high intelligence has made us so powerful that we’re degrading our land, waters and air and spoiling our habitats. Also, our capacity for love has led us to vastly overpopulate the earth and drive many other animal species towards extinction. If we don’t seriously pursue our own evolution we may go extinct ourselves and take many other species of animals and plants down with us. Shortly after Darwin included humans in the animal world Freud taught that much of what drives us is unconscious. But Freud thought that the vital unconscious drive is libido, a sexual energy. Then 60 years later (1962) Silvan Tomkins began teaching that some of our most important unconscious drivers are actually our emotions.   At the Love and Power Institute we are introducing people to the nine inborn emotions and studying how they work, separately and together, as well as with action and thinking. These emotions are interest-excitement, joy, surprise, distress-sorrow, anger, fear, shame, disgust and contempt. All of them support our survival and success in groups since we’re not just individuals but a herd species. Each emotion has unique beneficial and challenging aspects, so understanding them helps us navigate the emotional landscape we share with others in our group and culture. Men and women normally approach emotions differently and are expressive of some and shy or unconscious of others. Exploring these differences carefully can improve our ability to relate with different sexes, cultures, generations and ethnic groups as well as people with different sexual orientations. Though some emotions feel good, like interest, joy, contempt and sometimes anger, and others feel uncomfortable, like distress, fear, shame and disgust, surprise just amplifies the emotion following it. But studying emotions actually feels pretty good, since it is interesting, and that improves how any other emotion feels. Thus interest is our secret weapon to help us learn a lot more about each emotion and how to operate with them more intelligently with each other. Our training begins with an unusual approach. Instead of focusing on common emotional situations or emotional problems, we study each of our inborn emotions individually to understand how each works. Then we can explore that emotion’s effects on many different aspects of life and how it interacts with other emotions.  When we respect the value, benefits and challenges of each emotion, we can more easily accept its appearance in our lives–and respect ourselves as emotional beings. For example, there are many fascinating pair-relations between emotions, such as interest and shame. For when we’re interested enough in a person to call or text them on our cell phone and all we get is an answering device or no response at all, we may feel awkward, a mild form of  shame, and start second-guessing what might be happening. We may stay uncomfortable or just switch our attention to something else. A different form of shame is “hurt feelings” that may actually warn us that a damaged personal connection needs some work. But if a supportive  group is interested enough in understanding what happened to role-play the scene with the person involved, it might take notice of small moments of interest, disappointment, depression and irritation. and come to respect each of them. By slowing down this real-life experience the group could benefit from examining all four of these emotional moments in sequence with interest and respect. Then they could experiment with different feelings and ways to act towards the other person to begin the work of mending this relationship. Everyone involved could then consider and discuss similar approaches to their own comparable situations. Another powerful interacting pair of emotions is joy and distress. When someone we like or love is gone for longer than we want, separation distress can, “make the heart grow fonder.” So when we get together again we’re “overjoyed,” and the person we have missed becomes more valuable to us. The balance between these opposite feelings regularly makes relationships more durable. These are just two examples of the breadth and depth of emotional versatility we gain in this class. And much of the learning is experiential, through many methods, such as pair sharing and two-chair work as well as the dramatizing exemplified above. With the trust that develops from these encounters group participants can explore and resolve emotional problems in their own lives. They can practice working on damaged relationships in subgroups and develop the courage and language to restore them. With these tools in hand, we can develop both the skills and courage to mend and enhance close family and friendship relations. Then we can then apply them to intergroup collaboration and conflict resolution between nations, ethnic groups and even the powerful industries, environmentalists and governments that hold the future of our planet between them.