EGL309: Scifi and Cogsci on the Screen

This week we learned about emotions, more specifically how emotions are constructed. Whilst watching both “Inside out”, one of my favorite movies, and the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation “Man of the People” I really payed attention to whether or not the emotions of the characters were created or happened to them. I think both pieces of media display examples of both. I have to say I enjoyed both of these. Star Trek is growing on me, from the few episodes we’ve watched I’ve been so invested in what is going to happen to the characters.

Emotions are wildly complex and I think the film “Inside Out” does a rather good job at portraying that. Riley has five emotions, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear. Each of which have a large impact on Riley’s body and mind. Without emotions humans just like Riley would lack what it mean to experience life. It would be great for humans to always be happy just like Joy wants Riley to be, however this would be terrible for the world. If everyone was happy all of the time no one would be able to experience life for what it is. In order to survive humans have to feel every emotion, with anger or fear a human grows into a stronger and more intelligent person. While watching the film we see Riley become a more well rounded human when Joy comes to realize how important the other 4 emotions are to Riley’s human experience. The same goes for the other characters in the film like Riley’s mom and dad. With a look into her parents emotions we see they have the same emotions but are controlled by sadness and anger in the same way Riley is controlled by Joy for the most part.

The Star Trek episode confused me a bit at first. After digesting the episode though I think the episode highlights an idea that the relationship between ones emotions and body is very strong. As Troi is succumbed by the negative emotions of Alkars “mother” she becomes more and more unwell. I suffer from really bad anxiety and I sort of related to Troi becoming so sick. Whenever I have a really bad anxiety or panic attack my body feels like its falling apart. I really think emotions play a huge part into ones body. In this episode emotions could be transferred which I think is true to some extent in real life. When I see someone is hurting or sad I feel sadness with them especially when it’s someone you love. I think emotions are universal. Across the world we may all speak different languages or wear different clothes but we all can share the same emotions. When something tragic happens in the world everyone hurts together regardless of how far away it happened.

As we learned in lecture, emotions have subjective different views from different psychologists and philosophers. In the Film inside out, much of the film takes place in the head of an 11-year-old girl named Riley, with five emotions such as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. Her overall goal is to make sure that Riley is always happy. But by the end of the film, Riley, and the audience learns that there is much, much more to being happy than just the thought of only positivity. Toward the end of the film,  Joy seems to take control to some of her fellow emotions, particularly Sadness, Riley seems to achieve a deeper form of happiness. I think that this film shows adults and children a deeper meaning on emotion. As part of being human, Riley allows herself to feel sadness, in addition to fear and anger. This show us at the time when she thinks of running away from home. she decides not to go through with her plan. This choice reunites Riley with her family, giving her a deeper sense of happiness and contentment in the comfort she gets from her parents, even though it’s mixed with sadness and fear.

In Star Trek episode “Man of the People” As an ambassador mediates peace talks to end a fierce civil war, Deanna Troi begins to act emotional after spending some time with him. Troi begins aging rapidly and the crew must then race against the clock to figure out what Alkar has done to her, before she dies. Turns out Alkar is using Troi as a “receptacle” to telepathically shunt off all the negative emotions that he experiences during his negotiations. This episode seems to show them being emotionally innate more so than the “Inside out” view on emotions.During out lecture we spoke about Plato.  The great philosopher.Plato as we spoke about, believed emotions typically include both pleasant and unpleasant aspects! however, Aristole believed that emotions are an original and integral part of  ethics. Emotions are an inherent part of our moral reasoning and being, and therefore they should be an inherent part of any moral deliberation.

“Emotions are a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of psychological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation.” – Paul Ekman, PhD

As we learned he described them they describe people to have seven basic emotions: fear, anger, joy, sad, contempt, disgust, and surprise!

Is it innate or is it due to a stimulus? I think it is subjective to each person. As the professor taught us… different emotions can happen differently depending on the individual!

 

Emotion can be defined and explained in many different ways. Some believe that emotion is born with you while others see emotion growing and developing along with the person that wields them. In my opinion, I believe that both of these theories are correct. One is born and brought up with some form of understanding of emotions and how to respond to the people around them. However, as that person meets others and ventures past the area they were raised in, they will immediately realize that their understanding is not always true for other people.

In the movie “Inside Out” every one of the different emotions has their own quirks and personalities relating to their specific emotion. One of them is overly happy about the situations they come across while another is always viewing the negative side and how it all can go wrong. But, even though they are polar opposites, they all use each other’s opinions to understand any situation they are put through just like our emotions. When I see a dog with no collar on the street, I immediately feel anger for the owners. But after I realize that the dog is all alone and has a very good chance of being put in a kennel, my sadness makes the anger for the owners disappear and only makes me think of finding the dog a happy home. My emotions that I have developed through my own experiences worked with each other to help me decide what I thought was the right thing to do.

In the episode “Man Of The People”, Deanna Troi has an almost tragic encounter with the negative emotions of Ambassador Ves Alkar after the death of his mother. Alkar’s people are able to read the emotions of one another but not of other species and he uses this to trick Deanna into taking all of his negative emotions. This completely contradicts everything we’ve learned about emotion by placing artificial and non-original emotions into another person’s mind. What I found very interesting about this is that the negative emotions send Deanna Troi into a spiral of rapid-aging, almost leading to her death. One example of negative emotions rapidly aging people in real life would be former president of the United States Barack Obama along with many other presidents. In only 4 to 8 years of them being in office, their difference in facial structure, hair color, and overall physique before and after becoming president is frightening. Stress and anger tend to always have a negative aspect on people both mentally and physically without the release of emotions like joy.

This week we had to watch two films that both dealt with emotions in some way. People don’t tend to realize that emotions just don’t happen, they exist because we create them. As social creatures, human go through experiences that allow these said emotions to be felt and publicly observed. Human can tell for the most part what emotion someone is feeling because emotions are socially constructed. We collectively have agreed that if someone is happy, they might be smiling and someone that is sad might be crying. With that being said, emotions aren’t just shown in one way, people express themselves differently.

In the film Inside Out Riley is a joyful person. We know this because it’s the emotion that leads all the other ones. In the film, the emotions are little characters that live in the heads of people.  Riley was a joyful little baby, but when she didn’t get what she wanted or needed, she began to cry as do most babies. This “unlocked” a new emotion, sadness. This directly connects to the Theory of Constructed Emotion because Riley constructed new emotions as she experienced feelings.

Right at the beginning of the film as we see Riley growing up, we also see the events that caused her to create more emotions. Riley not getting dessert triggers Anger and running and tripping over a cord causes Fear to be visible.

Something that I was wondering about the film was that we see Riley’s lead emotion as Joy, the Mom’s as Sadness, and the Dad’s as Anger. I wonder what it took for emotions to switch leads or if it was always Sadness/Anger. Since the Mom, Dad, and Riley all have the same basic emotions, I feel like emotions in the movie were basic and universal. The emotions all acted in similar ways, but were specific to one’s life experience.

Star Trek’s “Man of the People” also showed me the Theory of Constructed Emotion. It is not explicitly said in the film, but Deanna’s body language showed that she was trying to get with Alkar. I’m assuming this because of the way humans have socially constructed emotions and could assume without being told. Deanna quickly changed emotions when Alkar refused her. We can’t say that she constructed the feeling of disgust and anger right then and there because she probably has experienced them in the past. Emotions, the mind, and body all work together. Once the mind was able to comprehend what was happening, the emotions started being projected and shown through the bodies actions.

 

Emotions are a very powerful thing that human experience. Not everyone expresses emotion in the same way, but for the most part, others can tell what one is feeling. Emotions are essential because a human mind without emotion really won’t be a human mind.

We can assume that Deanna had her seven primary emotions, but Riley only has five. I wonder which of her five emotions picked up the other two primary emotions…

 

 

Emotions are complex. In short, emotions are defined as “self-organizing patterns of an organism, the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable”. We all express emotions, and without them, we wouldn’t function as a species. With this in mind, the two things I watched this week, being the movie “Inside Out”, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Man of the People”, truly know how to convey emotions in a creative and respectable way.

The first thing that I watched was the movie “Inside Out”. I haven’t watched this movie ever since it came out in theaters back in 2015. I still remember that day, my sister and I watching the movie, and her crying when Bing Bong dies, and if I’m gonna be honest, I almost got teary eyed when that happened. One thing I wanna focus on are the emotion characters inside Riley’s head. The characters on Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear are the perfect example of basic emotions, which are defined as “a special class of emotions out if which all other emotions are compounded”. Each emotion in Riley’s head has a certain trait that they express, simplifying who they are. For example, Fear is always jumpy over the smallest things, Sadness always has a melancholy personality, which ends up being important at the end of the film, and Anger always has a mad tone to his voice. According to Pete Doctor, the director of the film, there were going to be more core emotions from the five in the film, including surprise, pride, and trust, but they were scrapped in favor of the core emotions in the movie.

I then watched the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Man of the People”. Honestly, after a few weeks of watching Star Trek, I think the show is starting to grow on me, and I might want to check out the show after classes are done. In this episode, the Enterprise brings in two people from a transport ship near Rekag-Seronia, Ambassador Ves Alkar, a Lumerian representative for the Federation and Sev Maylor, his mother, who seems to sense the emotions in others. So, Sev Maylor, and Deanna Troi, the Enterprise’s counselor are both empaths, which I found hilarious, because I mentioned the whole concept of empaths in one of my previous blog posts. Anyway, when Sev Maylor dies, Ves Alkar and Troi perform a grieving ritual, which was Alkar’s excuse to take over Troi’s body and dump all of his negative emotions on to her. Troi”s slow descent is a perfect example of James-Lange’s theory of emotion. In short, the theory states that “bodily changes come first and form the basis of an emotional experience. Thus, emotions are caused by bodily sensations”. So, as Troi is rapidly aging, her negative emotions are becoming for erratic, causing the aging process to rapidly advance until Troi dies. So, when Ves Alkar gets all his negative emotions placed back onto him at the end of the episode, his body rapidly ages until death.

So today we’re going to talk about how I cried for a solid 20 minutes because of Inside Out…

Umm, let’s restart that. We’re going to discuss emotions and how they are interpreted within Inside Out and Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Man of the People.”

Inside Out 

Inside Out has such interesting concepts when it comes to emotion, and also very important ones.

The emotions, mind, and body play as a team in this movie. Even though the emotions are viewed as separate characters and entities, they still work with Riley and her cognitive processes. They are a personified version of how humans think. We don’t have one track minds- different experiences give us different emotions, making us ponder how to react.

Riley has plenty of emotions her first night sleeping in her new home. She hears the noise and sees the shadow of a bus, and we see Fear start to flip out going, “What is that? Is it a bear? It’s a bear!” After some dialogue, Anger inputs his thoughts about the move. He says, “This move has been a bust.” Fear believes there’s 37 things for Riley to be scared of, Disgust mentions the icky stench in the house, and Anger exclaims, “I can’t believe mom and dad moved us here!” Joy tries to lighten things up, saying things like, “We’ve been through worse” and “Let’s make a list of all the things that Riley should be happy about.” This is much like how we in real life process emotions. If I were Riley, I’d have similar thoughts. I’d be scared of the unknown, disgusted by dead rats and the smell, and pissed at my parents for making me move. Possibly, I’d try to focus on the positives to feel better (I say possibly as someone who struggles with depression, if you know you know). Inside Out exhibits emotion similar to Arnold’s Appraisal Theory of Emotion. The emotions see something happen in Riley’s life, and usually say aloud if it’s good or bad. Their thoughts related to emotions are then exhibited in conversation, and from there they figure out the action they must take. After all, anger somehow came up with the “let’s jump on a bus to Minnesota to fix the occurring problems.”

On a more important note, Inside Out reveals that it is important to express our feelings in order to get the help we need. After Bing Bong’s rocket gets sent to the dump, he is overcome with sadness and says, “Riley can’t be done with me.” Joy says, “Hey! It’s gonna be okay, we can fix this. We just need to get back to headquarters. Which way to the train station?” Joy tries to pull him, but he says, “I had a whole trip planned for us” and stays put. Joy keeps trying to cheer him up to no avail. On the other hand, Sadness says, “I’m sorry they took your rocket. They took something that you loved. It’s gone, forever.” The two continue to talk about Bing Bong’s feelings, and he ends up crying and feeling better. Joy is like Riley in the beginning of the movie, pushing to hide feelings and avoid the problems to “stay positive.” On the other hand, sadness is like Riley at the end of the movie, pushing to express feelings in order to acknowledge and overcome them.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

I think it’s safe to say the episode “Man of the People” was weird.

I’d consider this episode an opposition to the Theory of Emotional Construction. This theory claims emotion as something that doesn’t happen to you, but rather something that is constructed. This episode shows emotion as something that happens to you.

We watch Deanna Troi deteriorate throughout the episode both mentally and physically after the “funeral meditation” with Alkar. Picard confronts Alkar after the autopsy of Alkar’s (not) mother to figure out what has been done to Troi. Alkar tells Picard, “You see, I discovered long ago I had the ability to channel my darker thoughts, my unwanted emotions to others, leaving me unencumbered.” He later says, “She’s an empath. I was reasonably certain I could establish a link with her. Frankly, I was amazed when I saw how quickly she’d aged. Usually my receptacles survive for years.”

Emotions are looked at as transferrable. It is also clear that it’s easier to transfer them onto empaths, which are people that can feel what others are feeling. Dr. Crusher called these transferred emotions on Troi “psychic waste.” It is as if emotion takes control of the person depending on how much dark emotion is transferred. Troi becomes a completely different person- more sexual, cruel, and attached. They happen to her; she doesn’t construct them. When the emotions transfer back to Alkar, he grows old and dies. He has no control of them.

This week we watched the movie Arrival and the episode “Darmok” From Star Trek: The Next Generation. From watching these two we can see the communication between people/species when you do not speak the same language. It is very easy to connect these two due to the fact that part of the main premise of them is the main characters trying to learn/understand the language of the other species that they are interacting with.

 

In the movie Arrival the main character, Louise, is trying to understand the language of the heptapods who have appeared around earth to understand why they are there. By seeing the heptapods and trying to learn their language from the writing they show her. She attempts to understand just based on viewing and her interpretation. It’s not until she develops a sort of telepathic connection to them, essentially rewiring her brain, she finally is not only able to understand them when they help her understand time but in turn it helps her learn their language. 

In the episode “Darmok” From Star Trek, we see the Enterprise trying to communicate with the Tamarians. Both the Tamarians and the Enterprise to not understand what the other is saying and so that all attempt to communicate until the Captain of the Tamarians transports himself and Captain Picard to the surface of El-Adrel, Picard and The captain of the Tamarians have to be patient in order to communicate and understand one another better and face the unknown enemy. The two ended up bonding and even though in the end the Tamarian captain was killed Picard understood the Tamarians language and was able to communicate with the Tamarian crew and let them know what happened and avoid conflict.

I once again apologize for my late post ! Still catching up a bit, but I’m eager to talk about empathy ! This topic was something I was really excited to discuss and will likely coincide with the main theme for my final project. I feel that empathy should be something that everyone has for others, though both of the pieces we watched for this class showed us otherwise.

I’m a big horror fan, so I was really excited to watch Posessor. However, it was easily one of the most disturbing things I have ever watched, and this is coming from someone who watches youtube horror series and true crime ! I immediately needed a palette cleanser after it, though I thought the story was artfully told in a pleasantly abstract way. While we’re able to understand Vos’ job and how has taken its toll on her, the way they portray her emotional disconnect and depersonalization as she “becomes” her new host. A scene I found notable was when Vos was watching her new host and slowly repeating what he said in a similar tone. While we could assume this was just another part of her job, we also see her doing this as she approaches her ex’s home. We can say Vos has empathy for those she has to kill, however this action leads me to believe that these feelings are practiced and not as genuine as I would have hoped. It reminded me of the movie Dismissed, about a young sociopath and his relationship with a professor at his school. During the big reveal (spoilers) we see old home videos of the student practicing emotional responses as a child. While this movie may be a better example for our current module, it did come to mind when I watched Vos rehearse what she was going to say.

Futurama is always a welcome reprieve after a movie like Posessor. I had mentioned the episode name to a friend (they’re a diehard fan) and they immediately knew everything that had happened. It was fun to talk about it! In the episode, Bender is implanted with an “empathy chip” so he’s able to understand Leela’s feelings better. While the episode has a happy ending and Bender is able to understand Leela (despite learning nothing) its clear that the empathy Bender was “feeling” was not genuine. This much is obvious due to the nature of the “empathy chip,” but it made me think of the “empathy” Vos tries to experience in Posessor.

Something that struck me was how Fry blamed Leela for the fact that Bender flushed himself down the toilet, a phrase I didn’t think I would ever type in an academic setting. He specifically blamed her emotions. This is something I’m definitely going to be thinking about during this current module.

 

In this week’s module, the film Inside Out and The Star Trek episode “Man of the People”, touched upon the intersection of our cognitive system with our emotions and how they function. I think the film did a nice job showing how our emotions can fluctuate due to our surroundings and how we are interacting with it. When Riley moves to a new home, we can tell that she seems to be in a nostalgic state or mood, but she experiences a variety of emotions on top of that. This relates back to our lecture where it discussed that moods are “modulated and sustained background feeling”, while emotions are “self organizing patterns of the organism, the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable”. When they first enter the new home you can tell that Riley is not impressed by their condition and misses her old home already, but after Joy plants an idea in Riley’s mind to play mini sticks (10:50), we see that she is happy. Riley is seen laughing with her parents, a physical display of the emotion she is feeling. Her nostalgic mood for her home did not disappear, it’s still there, just hidden below the current emotion she is feeling.

We see this again when Riley is at the dinner table with her parents and she gives them attitude after they bring up hockey (27:30), which causes Riley’s Dad to scold her. Riley eventually yells at her father to “shut up”, her anger clearly on display. This emotion is a reaction to the conversation between herself and her father, but her underlying longing for home is at the bottom of it.

For me, I felt like the film represented emotions as something that we first construct at birth, but then afterwards it is something that happens to us (post us creating them) which I think is interesting that it can be both in a way. When Riley is born and she first sees her parents (1:34), Joy is sprung into existence in Riley’s mind. This shows how Riley herself constructed Joy based on what she was feeling and seeing in that moment even though she was just a baby. We see that as things begin to happen Riley constructed all the emotions into existence, Sadness arriving second.

We see how emotions are represented to be the “masterminds” of the brain as they are located in Headquarters, which is far away from the other areas such as long term memory, imagination land, and the dreamland. The emotions in headquarters have access to a large console where there are buttons and levers that trigger something in Riley’s mind to then act a certain way physically with her body. When Riley stands up to introduce herself in front of the class, Sadness touches one of the “joy” memory balls and turns it blue. Now that that memory has a new emotion attached to it, Riley begins crying and having a physical reaction. We see this again when Riley is playing hockey and Anger fully sends one of the levers and Riley throws her hockey stick before stomping off the ice. But this made me think back to the lecture where it discusses that one of the tenets of the Theory of Emotional Construction states  that “Emotions are not something that happens to us, they are something we do”. So, this made me think about how the act of throwing her hockey stick is anger itself, and that’s how she was expressing it, not that anger “told” her to throw the stick as represented in the film with the console that was controlling Riley. 

 

In the episode of Star Trek, I thought they had a really cool way of representing negative emotions, and how it can take a physical toll on your body, showing how our emotions, mind, and body are so closely intertwined. Also, it touched base with how our own emotions can sometimes have an affect on how we perceive and interact with others. When Ambassador Alkar reveals what he did to Captain Picard (33:14), he justifies his actions by saying “If I came to these peace talks hindered by unwanted emotions, then Rekags and Seronians would be condemned to go on fighting.”.

He is worried about his own emotions becoming obstacles in trying to create peace between two sides who have their own negative feelings towards each other. In other words, the emotions have the capability to control your mind to an extent, because they can be so strong, and the power may be unconscious. This goes back to how in the film, the emotions Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear were located in the Headquarters with the brain with access to a console. Earlier in this scene though, Alkar says “I discovered long ago I had the ability to channel my darker thoughts”, which then leads to the idea that Alkar is so hyper aware of his emotions that he can separate them from his mind, even though they are actually heavily connected as the mind functions in unison with emotions. 

In a later scene when we see Deanna on the table, Captain Picard and his crew are trying to figure out what is wrong with her (36:20). They note that “If Alkwar is flooding her with all this psychic waste, that would explain the high level of neurotransmitters, all these negative emotions pouring into her, they have caused a chemical response in her brain”. We see throughout the episode that Deanna’s body is aging at an exponential rate, and her demeanor is becoming more aggressive. There seems to be a correlation between negative emotions and physical health, and how what we are feeling can ultimately take a toll on your body. Also, Alkar dies at the end of the episode because all of the negative emotions he had pushed onto Deanna went back to him and he looks like an old man. This made me think about how some people die of a broken heart. Their sadness and grief surrounding a loss actually cause their body to not function as it is supposed to. First the emotions affect the brain, the person becomes numb to their surroundings and eventually the body seems to follow. 

 

I’m late to the discussion on this one, but this module included media that deals with empathy in extreme sci-fi scenarios. While Futurama is always a fun watch, I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Possessor, as ’empathy’ wasn’t as intriguing of a topic compared to the previous week. Though it wasn’t an easy watch, I was pleasantly surprised with the sci-fi concepts and story.

I watched The Possessor first, and oh boy, was it hard to stomach at parts. The camera work was amazing (which only made the gory parts even gorier) and the concepts it tackled were really interesting. We follow Tasya Vos, an assassin who takes over other people’s bodies to kill her target. As she moves in and out of bodies, she becomes more and more disoriented with her identity and life itself. Even before the assassination on John Parse goes wrong, Tas has become prone to violence, killing her victims brutally with knives and blunt force. She also appears constantly confused, practicing her mannerisms before seeing her family and misremembering facts about her life.

I interpreted this descent into madness as the effect of an overload of emotions and experiences; when Tas goes into other’s bodies, she seems to gain a better understanding of her target while simultaneously losing a piece of herself in the process. In the final scene where Tas/Collin kill Michael, the process is described as parasitic – almost as if the process of switching bodies intrinsically causes insanity. This idea is supported by Girder’s apparent lack of emotion and statement that she feels overtaken by the act of entering another body. After the years of experience she had being an assassin, the process took it’s toll on her – just as it did to Tas in the end.

A scene that I connected to the lecture was when Tas is watching Collin as he talks to his girlfriend at home, mimicking everything he says. She’s likely directed by her employer to learn about her target this way because the mimicking activates her mirror neurons, which fire both when an organism witnesses an action and performs that action themselves. This would help her learn Colin’s mannerisms quicker.

I then watched the episode “I Second That Emotion” from Futurama, which was a welcomed change of pace from the nail biter that was The Possessor. Bender gets jealous of Nibbler – Leela’s pet – and flushes him down the toilet in retaliation. Leela is heartbroken because of this, but Bender doesn’t seem to understand or care about her feelings. She says that she would feel better if Bender understood how she was feeling, leading to the doctor implanting an empathy chip into Bender against his will. He’s then stuck feeling the same emotions as Leela. This is an example of simulation theory – the idea that understanding others involves simulating their mental states based on your own experiences. In this case, Bender is literally experiencing emotions as Leela does.

During his time with empathy, Bender is shown to experience emotions in a robotic way. When Leela feels an emotion, a light on the chip blinks red and Bender completely switches what he was previously thinking. He sometimes comments on these emotions with his true thoughts, though, stating that he hates Nibbler just after the empathy chip made Bender miss him. While he is experiencing Leela’s emotions, they are not accurate to how Bender wants to feel. Because of this, Bender doesn’t learn his lesson in the end and is just as big of a jerk as he was when flushing Nibbler down the toilet.