Inside Out
I love the movie Inside Out, I’m glad it was featured this week as a good excuse to watch it again.
The movie starts out with the base emotion of Joy for baby Riley when sadness intrudes on them. This movie vaguely incorporates the seven basic emotions but excludes contempt and surprise and they use the term “Joy” or rather, character, in place of happiness. A big focus of this film is also memory and how “core memories” make up Riley’s personality. Back to emotions though, Joy and Sadness are removed from headquarters when they’re sucked out of the tube that collects the days memories, along with all of her core memories.
Sadness can’t help but touch memories and turn them from happy to sad. This shows that Riley has a little bit of control over the influence of the emotions versus the emotions controlling her entirely.
Another connection to the lecture is to the quote by Lisa Feldman Barrett, she said emotions are socially constructed. When you look into the mind of Riley’s father, his primary emotion is Anger which is tied to the social construct of men being more angry, aggressive, quick tempered. When viewing the Riley’s mothers emotions, her primary emotion is Sadness, which if you have taken a sociology course on relationships, you’ll learn that those two types of families lack communication (which we even see) and Riley’s mom is probably continuously let down. I think becoming an adult in general often leads to happiness taking a back seat and an emotion like sadness or anger taking the forefront. You could also say that the leader emotion is the general mood.
While watching the film, I also tried to analyze which theory one could say Riley falls into in terms of arousal and appraisal and I’d have to say she falls into Arnold’s Appraisal Theory, event to appraisal to emotion to action. During the scene where Riley is video chatting with her friend, the emotions were observing what was happening and then choosing how to react which was by saying “I have to go” and slamming the laptop closed.
“Man of The People” Star Trek
In the Star Trek episode this week, the concept of an empath was brought up again. Deanna is an empath, when talking to Alkar who also appears to be an empath, he says he can only sense the emotions of his own species. When Alkar’s mother suddenly dies, he requests that Deanna do a ceremony with him since she’s the only other empath there but something seems to happen when the crystals they’re chanting with click together. She appears to lose her empathy, which is clearly seen when she’s talking with one of the crew members. It’s like the ceremony took away her ability to feel, or was his mother’s feelings transplanted to her? We finally find out that Alkar transplanted his dark thoughts into his “mother” and then did it to Deanna. Fast forward, when reviving Deanna, all of the dark thoughts, the emotions he can’t handle and doesn’t want to deal with, were transplanted back to Alkar, killing him. He completely lacked the empathy he claimed to have, even the title of the episodes shows how he contradicts himself.
4 thoughts on “In my feels”
Hi Meghan,
I love the title of this blog post. Especially because I wrote a whole dissertation chapter about fandom and feels, drawing on a lot of the material that you’ve been learning about this week.
I am glad that you are thinking about emotion and memory. That is something that will come up next week more when we look at memory specifically. It can be a bit tricky sometimes to untangle the concepts that we are discussing in this class.
Great observation about how emotions are gendered in American society. As you note, Riley’s father’s lead emotion is anger—which is considered a masculine emotion. It is interesting that Riley’s version of anger is also personified as male, which might further reinforce the idea that emotions are in some ways socially constructed as gendered.
I really like your discussion of Aklar’s lack of empathy. Can you connect that to what we learned about empathy in Module #3?
Jessica Hautsch
Hi Meghan, awesome analysis. I think Sadness is my favorite character as well. I agree that the movie incorporates the seven basic emotions, considering that there was originally going to be over 20 different emotions, including Pride, Surprise and Irritation, but it was cut down to the main five. I also like how you connected the head emotions of Riley’s parents to social constructs. I honestly didn’t even know about that during my first watch. I also agree that the show had creatively used the concept of empaths. I think that all the negative emotions physically changing Troi’s body is a unique way of showing James-Lange’s Theory of emotion, which proposes that bodily changes come first and form the basis of an emotional experience. Only in the episode, it’s vice versa, where the emotional experience comes first, which then affected Troi’s body.
hbaalbaki
Hi Meghan,
I love your analysis. Significantly the sentence “Sadness can’t help but touch memories and turn them from happy to sad.” How do we feel Joy without Sadness? I also agree that this movie will evoke many memories in us, including family and love, unforgettable (or forgotten) moments of memory, everything is so natural and delicate, and it is presented based on an imaginative story. In the end, it is still growth and farewell. I also love the character of Sadness, an inverted blue teardrop, bloated and sluggish. She always wanted to hide when she was sad, wrapping herself tightly and dazed. Glad you observed that emotions are socially constructed, especially by gender. Great! To be honest, I didn’t notice the connection between Riley and Arnold’s appraisal theories. I also agree with Hasan that negative emotions physically alter Troi’s body, which embodies James Lange’s Theory of Emotions here. Very special! Moreover, as you talk about the concept of empathy, specifically the relationship between Aklar and Troi.
yichen8
Hi Yiyi,
Great analysis of how Sadness’s character connects to our physical experience of sadness! These are important details in the film, so I am glad that you are drawing attention to them!
Jessica Hautsch