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Inside Out Movie Psychology

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When dissecting the movie Inside Out a variety of psychological concepts are discovered within the story line of the children’s animation. The concepts that come to mind after watching the film are emotions, false memory, and long-term memory. In psychology, and emotion is often defined as a complex state of feelings that result in psychological and even physical changes that can influence your thoughts, actions, and behaviors. An example of emotion could be whenever you watch an ASPCA animal rescue commercial you may feel sad and driven to help those animals. Secondly, false memory is described as a fabricated and distorted memory of an event, memories are not always an accurate recollection of event. In reality, memory is very prone to fallacy. …show more content…

During the first half of the film, Joy was the boss of the headquarters and most of Riley’s memories were all happy. The concept of Riley’s five emotions are borrowed from the concept of Paul Ekman, a well-known scientist in the psychology of emotions. Ekman stated that there are seven basic emotions, the five mentioned in the film, plus surprise and contempt, also explaining why the control board was expanded at the end of the film. When Headquarters is left to only Anger, Fear and Disgust Riley is left feeling solely those emotions to get her through this move and new environment. While Joy and Sadness are lost inside the paths of Riley’s mind she begins to lose many important social aspects of her life like “Friendship Island” which causes her to become angry and closed off from her hometown friends when they call to catch up with her or while she is trying to fit in and make new friends at her new school. One of the most important isalnds that was lost inside of Riley’s mind was “Goofball Island” since she lost her since of happiness she wasn’t able to have fun and enjoy her new home. The second concept, false memory, is more prominent throughout the movie. In the beginning of the film, it shows how the daily memories are kept in headquarters and then are shipped down to long-term storage at the end of the day while riley is sleeping. When sadness got curious to what would happen if she touched one of the memories she immediately altered the memory from joyful to sad, causing false recollection of the actual memory. While trying to reverse the emotion change, Joy and Sadness are swept down the tubes into memory storage. Joy then gathers up the now sad memories and proceeds to try to make her way back to headquarters to fix the issues. While strolling through long-term memory storage sadness begins to run

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