Speaking of Pixar’s new film “Inside Out”, consulting psychologist Dacher Keltner answered this question: What did the film get right?
“Well, I think that the film really got a couple of big ideas about emotions right. One, [emotions] are really critical to how we look at the world—our perception and our attention and our memories and our judgment. They guide us in our handling of really important life circumstances, like moves and developmental changes.
The second thing is more subtle to perceive in the movie, and it’s something that we’ve been arguing for in my lab: People in different traditions like to refer to emotions with a social idiom or a grammar of social interactions. Emotions are the structure, the substance, of our interactions with other people. If I’m falling in love with somebody, everything that I do in that euphoria of love—buying flowers, reciting poetry, touching the individual’s hair—it’s textured by the feeling, and it sets up these patterns of how we relate to each other. Those scenes in particular with Riley’s fights with parents and running away and coming back are all about sadness. That’s what it really got right. Emotions shape how we relate to other people.”
Now you know. This is one of the reasons we spend time teaching Titus 2 students emotional literacy concepts and focusing so much energy on the idea of not allowing emotions to control one’s life, but to learn to be knowledgeable about how to identify, articulate, and respond to one’s feelings.