Berkeley Talks: The science behind the emotions in ‘Inside Out 2’

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday. Also, we have another podcast, Berkeley Voices, that shares stories of people at UC Berkeley and the work that they do on and off campus.

(Music fades out)

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Hello everybody, and welcome. Welcome to this wonderful opportunity we have to talk about the science behind Inside Out 2.

Hi, everybody. My name is Allison Briscoe-Smith, and I am a child clinical psychologist and senior fellow here at the Greater Good Science Center. What we do here at the Greater Good Science Center as we share the research about wellness and how to live a more compassionate and kind life. And we’ve got this amazing opportunity today to dive into both the science and the imagination behind Inside Out 2.

We have three guests with us today. We have Dr. Dacher Keltner, we also have Dr. Lisa Damour, and we also have Maurissa Horwitz. So we are going to have this wonderful opportunity to learn from them as the people who’ve produced the movie and also the science behind it. So what I’m going to do is going to give them an opportunity to introduce themselves and talk a little bit about how they got involved and what their role is in the movie.

I want to give a hint before we start this though, that there are going to be spoilers. So our hope is that you’ve seen the movie. But we’re going to dive into it and there are spoilers. So if you haven’t seen it yet, maybe come on back to this later after you’ve seen it. But we’re going to get a chance to hear from folks. I’ll get a couple of questions that I want to ask, but many of you, actually close to 800 of you, have sent in questions. We’re not going to get through them all, but we’re going to go ahead and get through some of the kind of themes that have come up.

So come along with us. Welcome. Good to see everybody here. But let’s start off with you, Dacher. We’ll start with you, Dacher, and then Lisa and then Maurissa to introduce yourselves and to talk about your role with the movie. Dacher, why don’t you start?

Dacher Keltner: Yeah. Thank you Allison. And welcome everybody. My name is Dacher and I’m a professor at Berkeley, faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center. And, germane to our conversation today, have studied emotion and been fascinated by emotions. Studied them in the lab for 35 years, fascinated by them since I was a child.

I got involved thanks to Pete Docter who directed the first Inside Out. He called me up one day and said, “We’re making a movie about a young girl’s emotions. Do you want to help out?” I’m not lying. I thought he wanted to use my voice as a character, which I got wrong, but he wanted to know about the science. And his team did, Ronnie Del Carmen and others.

I got involved in the first film because it’s this incredible opportunity to visualize, to imagine, to use Allison’s word, an understanding of emotion, which I think is core to life, core to well-being not only the inside of emotion, how they influence our memories, our sense of identity, our sense of morality, but also outside, the out of emotions of how they structure social interactions. And that’s been a guiding theme of my work.

And then with Inside Out 2, Kelsey Mann called me up and Meg Lafave, one of the writers, a central writer, said, “We’re going to start it up again.” This was right before Covid really hit. “What are the new emotions that we can think about for an adolescent girl? Riley would now be 13.”

And that’s fascinating because I’ve always felt that emotions fundamentally are social. And adolescence, as Lisa has really guided me in thinking, is fundamentally social about situating the self in a new place. And then right away they said our core emotion, the star is Anxiety. And there’s so much anxiety today in our young people and I saw it as this incredible opportunity to have a broad cultural conversation about the anxiety and how we’re doing.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Excellent. And we’ll get a chance to dive in a bit more to Anxiety and perhaps some of the other characters. But Lisa, how about you and your involvement?

Lisa Damour: Well, first of all, just really thrilled to be here with all of you. I’m glad that we have so many folks joining us. So in May 2020, I got a call saying that the folks at Pixar wanted to talk to me. And I got on a Zoom because it was early pandemic, and I don’t live in California, with Kelsey and Meg Lafave. Kelsey Mann. And they were holding two of my books. They were holding my book Untangled, which is about typical and expectable development in adolescent girls, and my book Under Pressure about stress and anxiety in girls. I have such a vivid memory of seeing them with those books. And we just got going into a conversation about the film, what they wanted to do.

In that first conversation, Anxiety was on the scene. I remember seeing sort of a sense of what she was going to look like at that time. She’s changed a lot in the course of the film. Got a lot cuter as the film unfolded, which I think is a really good thing. We had a deep conversation actually that day about perfectionism and perfectionism in girls especially and how, in my clinical practice, how we work with it clinically with young people.

And then I just had the honor of continuing that conversation over four years, made a couple trips out to Pixar. Dacher and I saw the drafts and gave feedback. I had forgotten about this until the premiere and somebody reminded me, I did an hour long presentation for the whole crew on adolescent development and what we expect to see and how it unfolds. So I mean, it is as fun as anything I’ve ever gotten to do in my professional life. And just, I mean, all upside. All upside.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: That’s awesome. And again, we’ll get a chance to talk about some of these key points that you’ve raised up about development. There were lots and lots of questions about, is what we’re seeing really typical of development. So just a precursor to some of the questions that came up.

But Maurissa, we’d love to hear from you about your involvement, your role, and how this works for you and what you were actually trying to accomplish by making this film.

Maurissa Horwitz: Sure. OK. Well that’s a lot to answer. I’ll do my best to be very brief because obviously I’m here to learn from Lisa and Dacher as well, so I don’t want to take up too much time. But I’m Maurissa Horwitz. I’ve been the lead editor on Inside Out 2 for the past three years. So I came on a little bit actually after Lisa and Dacher were involved because they were involved in the script writing phase.

Editorial’s role in animation is a little different than live action. So simply, we’re in charge of putting together all the picture and sound for the movie. But animation works a little differently where we’re really iterating and trying a lot of things for the first one to two years. So I lead a team of very talented other editors and assistant editors and we’re recording the dialogue in house for a while before we get our final actors. We’re editing with storyboards for the first year and a half, two years before anything gets to animation. And so we’re really kind of crafting the pacing, the humor, the emotion through the edit over the course of those three years.

As far as our intention as filmmakers, that’s a huge question. I think always as filmmakers, we want to tell a story that people of all ages can connect to, that’s fun to watch. With the legacy of Inside Out, I think in our heart of hearts, we are all hoping to also have a story that could help families, kids, parents have conversations afterwards and maybe just kind of open the door to understanding more emotions.

Anxiety was always a big part of the plan from Kelsey’s first iterations of the script with Meg. And I also think the big part of what we were hoping for is right there in our end credits. If you watch our very long end credits, there’s a line at the end that says, “This film is dedicated to our kids. We love you just the way you are.” And I think for Kelsey and Mark, our producer, that was always the heart of what we were hoping to say with this movie.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It’s such an important message to have out there. And again, a place that we want to be thinking about, what parents are getting from the film, people, how they’re receiving it.

But Maurissa, and you’re talking about this, I’m sure there’s many folks in the audience like myself that were like two years, three years of editing, iterating. So I actually want to come to Lisa and Dacher to hear you talk a little bit about what did you learn about moviemaking? We’re going to get to the science, but this process of iteration. And Lisa, you mentioned you got a chance to train the folks to think about adolescence, but maybe we’ll start with you Lisa. What was a major thing you learned about making a major animated movie?

Lisa Damour: Oh, man. So I think probably my exposure, I probably just scraped the surface of what was actually going on for as much contact as I had. I know I am so humble in the face of the extraordinary scale and talent of the involved in this. But one of the things I noticed between the last draft I saw in the final version was there was a pretty significant shift in actually the role of Envy and Ennui, that they came much more into the story. And I was like, “Holy moly, how much is on the cutting room floor?” I realized there is just so much that has been made and set aside. I think that was, for me, the biggest takeaway, is just like, what’s in the can at the end, maybe this is for all films, but certainly for this film, is a very minority percentage of what was actually created.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: I mean, I think it holds the opportunity to think about how much thought and energy and curation really goes in. And again, I want to highlight that in reading the kind of questions, there were lots of super detailed questions. Some people had their favorite emotions and wanted them to have more screen time or less. But even hearing about this helps us to think about. This was a thoughtful curation, but Dacher, you’ve been through this before, but what did you learn this time around about the moviemaking process?

Dacher Keltner: Yeah. I mean, first is how much we need art today. We’re a data-driven world and there’s so much science, etc. They’re just unique powers of art to convey wisdom about the human condition obviously that we lose sight of. And I remember Pete, one of the first questions he asked for Inside Out was like, “Tell me how many emotions there are. We’ve got five, what do you think?” And I was like, “Well, there are 23 emotions and let me list them” in a boring fashion. He’s like, “Dacher, we need to tell a good story. Add one emotion to this drama and that will give us, because a dramatic narrative with 22 characters probably wouldn’t work.”

And I think that the second film, Inside Out 2, to convey to a child or a teenager or a parent like all emotions have their points and their purposes, which we know scientifically is sort of … And you convey it scientifically, it’s a little palette or boring, but to show it with the visuals and the Anxiety scenes in the film or the wonderful things that Envy does in the film and to say, “This has a place in the human mind.” And as Maurissa said, quoting Mark, we should love our minds and our children the way they are in terms of their emotional capacities. That’s so hard do with scientific data, and here’s a film that reveals the big insight. So it was humbling, like Lisa said, just to know how much we need the emotions to understand things like emotion and consciousness.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It sounds like a beautiful kind of relationship to be able to integrate the art and the science. It’s something that I know as a scientist and as a researcher I don’t get a chance to do all the time, but to be able to see it, come together in this way.

Maurissa, I have a question for you. We talked with both Dacher and Lisa about what was surprising about the moviemaking process. Maurissa, do you have something that was surprising about adolescence, about emotion that came through? What showed up for you on your learning around the science?

Maurissa Horwitz: Sure, there’s so much. I also just want to say before we get too far away from what Dacher and Lisa said that I started as a chemistry major in college. So to be honest, to be able to incorporate some science into filmmaking was such a joy for me. I know every time I say joy then it’s a pun, but it really was such a great way to integrate two sides of my brain that have always been very active. So thank you for allowing me to be a part of that.

When I came on, because I came on basically once the script was approved, and I was just voraciously eating up all the interviews and Zoom calls that Dacher and Lisa had done with the team and had been recorded and started reading Lisa’s book so that I could feel as connected to the material as Kelsey and Meg already did. I don’t have kids, but I actually felt like I was learning more about my adolescent self as I worked on this movie.

And I think being able to really name those emotions that come up during this period, because you can feel like you’re very alone and no one else is experiencing things or seeing things the way you do. And I think just having that touchstone of, “No, these are regular parts of development and things will feel out of control.” Even “The Brain Under Construction,” Lisa, which I know is a chapter title I think in one of your books, or a section title and we physicalize it. But I think knowing that there’s that amount of growth and reworking going on physically inside, it’s just a great thing to be aware of as a touchstone.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: And super helpful again for … You’re talking about something that again kind of came up, which is helpful for kids to understand, but so helpful for us as adults to understand about ourselves. I know that I and many other folks had that moment. I’m not sure if you all have seen all the memes of the grownups crying in the show, crying as they kind of watch it. But there’s something that was important that was being communicated to adults.

You all have talked about how the ideas for adults to know that we love children just the way they are, but did any of you have a thought about what you wanted adults to take away, what you wanted parents to take away? Maybe Lisa, I’ll start with you. What did you really want parents or grownups to take away from this movie?

Lisa Damour: So my work is on teenagers. One of the things that I consistently learn from parents of teenagers is how isolated and lonely they feel. And it’s what Maurissa said, that to see what one is experiencing separately from others and one is anxious about, to see that it is shared, to see that it is natural is an incredible thing.

And so there’s so much in this film about the normal and expectable events of adolescence. I’ll give a few examples. This is so quick and it’s right at the beginning, but it’s where they’re looking at like, “What’s going on with the islands?” Family Island has receded and it’s tiny and it’s gray and also Riley is standing apart from her parents on it. And Friendship Island is upfront like looking like an amusement park. That is so quick and so funny and so critical for parents to see that there’s nothing broken or wrong in their home. That their kid no longer wants to tell them very much, is standing separate on this small gray island and really wants to be on Friendship Island. That is so true. But when it’s happening in people’s homes, they’re like, “What happened? Or what’s wrong with our kid or what’s wrong with our family?”

That, the overnight quality of puberty, the intense reactiveness that we see in Riley when her puberty button alarm goes off. The anxiety … I love that scene where scanning the face, like, “Let’s get another read on that wrinkle in the brow.” That hyper awareness of social cues, all of that is boilerplate adolescence, and all of it I am hearing families think is evidence that something’s wrong.

Dacher Keltner: Yeah.

Lisa Damour: So just the gift to put this on the big screen as universal experience, so reassuring to kids, to parents, so essential for helping families.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Mm-hmm. Dacher, I heard you in agreement. Is that aligned with what you were thinking about?

Dacher Keltner: Yeah. Lisa and I have been in conversation a lot about this film together and I could not agree more. I think our colleague Steve Hinshaw has written about the triple bind placed on young girls, your mentor, I think, Allison, in grad school.

You have so much pressure on young people to be perfectionistic and excel in everything. I think there’s a theme in the film of calming that down, that narrative in families that parents can be part of. And then just like Lisa said, and I wish I had seen this film when my daughters were young teenagers, the emotional chaos that’s almost normative of a child entering into adolescence of … And I would say specifically panic and anxiety, those are part of our evolutionary design. They have their point. They can get excessive, of course, but just to be there and to have a language, let the child know they’re not alone, these are common reactions, such a powerful … Made me cry to think about my own past with panic and how it runs in the family. And to have some visual tools and wisdom I hope parents stay close to. And I’m hearing over email that it’s changed their dynamics with their teenagers.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Mm-hmm. And Maurissa, what about you in terms of the hopes that you had that grown-ups would walk away with?

Maurissa Horwitz: I mean, I think from the feedback I’ve gotten from friends and colleagues, it’s exceeded any hopes I could possibly have had. I’m just hearing that conversations are happening in families, whether it’s around anxiety or self-talk. Just that parents and families are feeling seen by this movie and relate to it so much. It’s really incredible to be a part of that.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It sounds like this kind of desire to normalize is really, really important. And to see oneself, the art to see oneself. I thought the visual depictions of things like panic were ones that my clinical brain immediately went to. This is something I can use in therapy. This is something that I can use for the clients that I work with to help them see.

And one of the things that I wanted to lift up and ask as a question is that I actually have had previous students who did a dissertation around using Inside Out to create treatment, to create an opportunity to talk about it. We actually got a number of questions from folks that are currently going through some sort of therapeutic treatment with Inside Out to help learn how to name emotions, learn how to feel motions, which is really quite amazing.

I also want to frame, and then Lisa, I think you spoke to this as well, we are in a particular time period where the struggles of adolescents are front and fore. I work clinically very much in the way that you kind of said where I’m trying to spend a lot of time with parents trying to tell them what is normative, and parents are panicking and kids are panicking and we have a mental health crisis amongst our kids.

So I’m actually really curious if we could get specific about what you think, in addition to what you’ve just talked about, how we can use something like this art to help in the midst of all of this. I don’t want to put this as like this is the thing that will solve all the things, but this is not the medicine that will solve all the things, but something’s going on here that is pretty important. So Lisa, I’ll turn it back over to you and think about what do you think the potential is for how this can be helpful in the context of our mental health crisis with kids?

Lisa Damour: OK. So there’s a couple things just to state the incredibly obvious, but this is important. Emotions are abstract. As they live in our lives, they’re vague. And we know as clinicians that they’re best managed if you can share them. I know we all take this for granted, but I think it’s actually worth articulating. For the film to personify the emotions, to make them recognizable, to give them carefully chosen colors, creates a shared language. And suddenly this abstract thing is no longer abstract, it’s a cute little character that everyone can talk about together, opens up the possibility of an interaction like this at home where a teenager scrolling through their phone looking on social media, feeling lousy about themselves and for a loving adult to say, “Oh, that’s making you feel envy. You’re feeling envy.”

OK, now that can happen. And it could happen before. It can happen a lot easier now. And as soon as that word is shared in that space … First of all, the feeling comes down to size. Second of all, the kid’s not alone with it. Third of all, one of our rules clinically is everything feels better on the outside than on the inside, right? It’s out in the world shared. That all gets achieved with that cute little character now existing in a shared lexicon. That’s massive. So there’s that.

Then the other massive thing … I could go on forever and ever so I’m just going to say these two things. I can’t say enough about how desperately we need as a whole big culture to make normal the experience of uncomfortable emotions. We do have kids who are suffering. We do have an adolescent mental health crisis. We also have a grand misunderstanding where we are too often in the headlines equating psychological distress with a mental health concern. They are constantly talked about as though they are the same. You can tell it makes me bananas because psychological distress is natural to being human, a big part of being a teenager. And so we have a lot of kids and a lot of parents who on a bad day are worried that something is really wrong when what they only need to be worried about is how to help that kid feel better.

And so the achievement above all of this film is to take these nine characters, only one of whom is pleasant to experience and treat them as essential, natural, necessary and valuable and to do that in a delivery device that reaches so many more people than anything. We can do as university people, we can do as clinicians. I mean, I am so excited about it because that’s the message that needs to happen and this is the right delivery device.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: That’s perfect. I am cheering and aha-ing from [inaudible] here as another clinician and also as a mom. And as anyone in this space who cares about kids, to reiterate that kind of message and to create a shared language is really impactful. Maurissa and Dacher, what else do you think about in terms of the potential for helping address some of the concerns?

Maurissa Horwitz: Please, Dacher. I am not the doctor in the room.

Dacher Keltner: Yeah. But I would love to hear, Maurissa, your thoughts about … It was such a brilliant and delicate presentation of anxiety and panic in particular. I think I’ll weigh in, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about how you approach that as an editor. I thought it was brilliant.

Yeah, Allison, we know scientifically I think this film, and I’m hearing from people from all over the world, they’re using this in clinical educational settings formally and informally. We know the richer your language of emotion, the better you fare in almost every way. And this film has a subtle distinction between fear, concrete threats to your physical survival, and anxiety, right? “Oh my God, I’m imagining what’s going to go wrong in my future, when I go to the party with my friends.” That’s interesting.

I think just like Lisa said, in the science we say, “Oh, they’re the negative emotions,” like my favorite emotions, sadness. They’re not negative. They’re not bad for us for the most part. They’re part of human nature, and the film is challenging that and giving us a new view of these emotions. Such powerful lessons as Lisa said.

But I love to hear your thoughts on the editor’s view of panic and anxiety, Maurissa, how you handled it. It’s a hard one, right? I was scared for you guys like, “God! Are we going to trigger a bunch of panic attacks nationwide?” So what’d you think?

Maurissa Horwitz: Yeah, it was a really careful balance and certainly something we kept reworking, even just Anxiety, leading up to the anxiety attack at the end. Where are we dialing her? Because I think something we took away from what Lisa talked to us about is anxiety is useful. Anxiety, Lisa, I’m sure this is exactly what you told us, but we’ll help you remember to study for tests. So you need some anxiety in your life to remember to do things like that, but it’s when it gets out of control that you need to learn how to manage it, and we all need to learn how to manage it.

So there was a version of the movie that you were with Riley in that panic attack for a lot longer and it was too hard to sit with for that long. You kind of wanted to give up on the movie before it could resolve. And so it really was a balancing act and especially interweaving the three kind of storylines because obviously there’s Riley, there’s what’s going on in headquarters, and then there’s out in the mind world. And so that was something we were just constantly checking in on. And that’s why we put the movie together and check in on it as a whole piece so often in animation, is to make sure we’ve got that balance and that you get to enjoy these emotions. You get to and understand their value.

And Lisa, you touched on envy and on we kind of changing towards in the last version. And that was something where we had a lot of characters and we wanted to certainly make sure that the Joy, Anxiety, Riley storyline was working first and foremost. But it was really important to us that every one of these emotions, we understood the positives that they bring, that Envy can be a motivator and a goal setter, which Lisa, I think we chatted at lunch one day because we were really struggling with Envy. We were struggling how to make her not a one-note character. And that really helped us lay a foundation of how to write her to see the positive before she kind of gets unhinged about things. So it was just a constant balancing act and I’m really happy with where we landed.

I think the panic attack feels very real, but it also … We use the touch, the sound, the reconnecting with the world, which I know is a strategy for dealing with anxiety. And it was really important. There are a lot of people on the crew who deal with anxiety and have had to learn to manage with. And so everyone brought their own experiences with that in terms of what they wanted to see on screen.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: I mean what you all are both speaking to, Maurissa, that you’re talking about is that you had some inherent trust that kids could be capable of seeing and engaging and managing. I’m also just curious that must’ve been hard or was there pressures in the field even, in children’s media to not show distress? Was there a pressure around that? What does it mean to actually be able to show that? Because we do have a culture, I think, that as Lisa’s kind of speaking about that I understand empathetically is about, “Should I worry?” but doesn’t give us the space to say that, “This is uncomfortable and you’ll be fine.” So curious. Maurissa, just in terms of what it meant in children’s media or media at large. What came up?

Maurissa Horwitz: Sure, and I may not know about all the outside conversations going on, but I will say it was really interesting. We do what we call a preview screening usually about a year before the film needs to be finished. And so we take the film out to a public audience for the first time and it’s in various stages of animation. We do a family screening and then we do an adults-only screening.

What was fascinating in the family screening was we then have a focus group with kids and their parents. The kids could explain what was going on in the movie, got the messaging. I mean, from sense of self beliefs, anxiety, they got it all. And then we had the adults-only screening, we had a focus group and they’re like, “Well, I think this is too much for kids. I don’t think kids are going to understand this. I think it’s going to be too emotionally intense.” And so there is an expectation that kids can’t process or it’ll be too much. It’s really wonderful to do those family screenings and just see how smart and resilient and absorbing in a good way kids are of lessons and stories that matter to them.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Lisa, I see you nodding in agreement, I wanted to pull you in. Just anything that resonates from what she’s speaking about?

Lisa Damour: I love hearing it, and I’m not surprised.

I think sometimes in a well-meaning way, we treat kids as much more fragile than they are. I think that that can kind of become a self-fulfilling prophecy at times. And I think instead, I mean especially in this sort of format where it’s thought through and careful and not overwhelming and also beautiful, I think the art piece is really critical here. Kids can handle a lot. The more that we help them to handle, the more capacity they have, right? And that’s the goal, right, is that we expand what kids can do and give them confidence that when they encounter uncomfortable things, they have the wherewithal to manage it. That’s what gives kids freedom, right? Whereas if we convince them that they can’t handle much, they get very constrained in their options.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Another beautiful kind of lesson from what was shown there.

So I want to pivot a bit. I selfishly got to ask all my questions, but I wanted to pull from the questions that were coming from our audience and kind of pivot a little bit to some of the questions that came up for them. So one of the questions that came up, and we’ll see who wants to take it first, is about gender, is about this was an examination of a couple of different things, a girl’s experience in a girl’s setting, that was also brilliant, in a social kind of way. But what does this say about gender? Is this different for boys? How is it different? I know that’s a whole nother three hours, but any thoughts about either the choice around sticking with girls and girls relationships or what this might say and how typical this is of kind of boys as well? Does anyone want to jump in on that? Or I can pick whoever looks at me longest. OK.

Lisa Damour: I did a chapter on gender and emotions, so I’ll just start there.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah.

Lisa Damour: But I don’t want to … I think if you were to do Inside Out 3 with a boy, all the same basic emotions would be in it, but there would be a layer about what was allowed to be shared with the world outside. Maybe more so a bunch of like cops, characters who do not permit exposure of vulnerable emotions to the outside world, right? So there’s this whole other kind of policing literally to use cops that boys do with themselves and one another around what’s allowed to be shared.

I think the social landscape would look different too, the ways in which boys relate to each other and ways in which they connect, very much conforming to a lot of these rules, very painful often for boys. So there’s a lot that’s universal here and there’s a lot that is pretty girl specific, I think.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Maurissa, maybe you can talk a little bit about the decision that was made or the decisions that were made to really focus in on girls.

Maurissa Horwitz: It’s funny. After our very first screening of the movie, we did get a note of, “Why can’t this be about a boy?” And I think even all the men on the crew were like, “Oh, teenage boy brain, do we want to get into that?” And I just have to say that the women on this crew, we started the movie with a storyboard artist team that was half female, which I had never been on before, which was amazing. My editorial team was also gender-split and sometimes majority female, depending on who was there.

And so it was really great to be able to have conversations about the creative content and make sure that it was feeling true to a girl’s experiences as well as even the characters. It’s something that I think Bree, Riley, Grace, making sure they had kind of unique personalities and responses to things because sometimes you see a gaggle of girls and they all just seem like they’re laughing and the same. And so it was something that we all really kept advocating for to make these girls distinct but also a universality, correct me on my words, sorry, doctors, but basically just a common experience. To be honest, I think having a unique personality within the girl makes it feel more universal because you know it’s a real character, not just a shell. I don’t know if that helps answer the question, but that’s what I got.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It totally helps answer the question. It also gives a little bit of insight as to how this process was done. And the desire, we don’t have to do all the things with one movie. You all did a lot. Which makes me actually ask the next question, which is going to be for you, Dacher, which is, in taking a look at many of our questions from our audience, many of them know and love you, Dacher, for all the work that you’ve done on thinking about emotion, writing about emotion, but also most recently on Awe. And we got a lot of people fighting for Awe. “Where was Awe? What’s the role of Awe?” So I was really curious about how did you think about Awe in this movie? Did you see Awe on this movie? But maybe you could talk a little bit both for audiences that are not quite familiar with the role of Awe, maybe you could talk just a little bit about where might be for adolescents.

Dacher Keltner: Yeah, it’s almost like the Peanuts cartoon strip where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown and he comes running in and she pulls it away and he falls. And that happens to me with when Pete for Inside Out, he’s like, “What emotion would you add?” I was like, “It’s got to be awe or compassion.” Awe, the feeling of wonder about things that are mysterious. Einstein, it’s a basic human state of mind. Compassion, the central ethical emotion in human evolution. My lab’s devoted. And they haven’t made it into the film yet.

But it’s interesting, it’s almost a question for Maurissa because when you watch the film, and Lisa referred to the beauty of Inside Out, these are beautiful, beautiful compelling films. There’s not only awe in the visual representation of Riley’s mind and her social life in so many ways, and that’s important. We can have awe towards our minds. They’re also full of another emotion that hasn’t made it yet, which is love, love and compassion, that we love her mind and the interactions between the emotions. So I hope someday those three emotions will be part of it. I love Lisa’s speculations about the boy version. Awe, love, compassion feels like 17 years old, 18 years old. So I have hope. And I’ll keep pitching. But what do you think, Maurisa? How would you add emotions or how do these transcendent emotions figure in the film?

Maurissa Horwitz: Sure. And I will say we did briefly have Awe in the movie. And I’m sorry that Awe didn’t make it. Awe came in the epilogue scene and looked a lot like Dacher in our storyboard version. So maybe for the next one.

As far as compassion goes, it is actually something we talked a lot about with Joy, that we kind of wanted to show an evolved Joy in this movie, that she starts from kind of a childlike Joy and that what we were hoping came through is that a compassionate … Compassion was part of Joy’s evolution. That she is a compassionate Joy as well. So not that it can’t still possibly be its own character, but it was a topic of conversation, and love, too. Love has so many forms. That one was a hard one for us to figure out the place in this movie, but it’s certainly on all of our minds.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: I think there are ways in which they were kind of the implicit emotions that were there because I actually saw Awe sneak in there a couple places, just kind of these kind of moments and pieces. And I actually really saw the end as being about self-compassion. So one of the things we do a lot here at GGSC and have kind of given people opportunity to learn about is self-compassion. Because when we think about it, this was all stuff that was going on internally, the ability to actually think about, “I am good enough” or “I am possible.” Those kinds of pieces is self-compassion. So maybe it’s an opportunity to think about how they’re there, just not writ large in the characters, but also the opportunities. I know that I, and my kids hate this, I went on my lecture to them after they watched the movie about in self-compassion. But there might be these kind of opportunities to think about that as present.

But in thinking about this incredible iterative and editing kind of process, I also wanted to think a little bit about … And I’ll turn to you Lisa for this. Were there things around adolescence that you felt clearly you couldn’t do it all? But big pieces that weren’t there that you had hoped for or want to make sure that get there and some kind of conversation? Was there a thing? This is a couple of questions that we got around this, like, how much is this aligned with the science? So I’ll turn to you, Lisa, to think about that a little bit.

Lisa Damour: Adolescents are complicated. You cannot capture all of them. Things that Inside Out 3, if it continues with teenagers, might pick up risk taking, right? Pushing boundaries, doing things adults don’t want you to do as a job of teenagers. More direct questioning of authority, that teenagers really starting to poke in the adults in their world. Push back much harder on what adults are saying and doing is all natural to teenagers. Romance, right? That begins in adolescence, whether it’s acted on or not, but powerful romantic feelings are a big deal. So I could go on and on it, but those are three things that when I think about the landscape of what it means to be a teenager, risk taking, pushing back on grownups, starting to love life in one form or another. There’s room to grow here.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Room for the multiple iterations. I’m looking forward to Inside Out 47 when we menopause, so let me know when that’s coming.

But there’s a lot that we can kind of cover and see here. And there was actually specific questions about the types of theory that were used and were used to kind of, whether it’s emotion-focused kind of theory or adolescent development. So one of the questions that states here is like, “Were there specific psychological theories or research that influenced the development of the storyline?”

And so Maurissa, you hinted at you wanted a more grown up … Don’t worry, I saw that look. We’ll go [inaudible]. But that you wanted a more kind of grown up Joy. But I am curious again for Dacher and Lisa, maybe Dacher, we can talk with you a little bit, a chance for us to kind of step into our academic spaces a little bit. But what type of science did you lean on? What type of theories did you really lean on to present? You mentioned some of the emotion kind of piece. But I was really interested, for example, with the kind of visual scanning of the eyebrow, I thought immediately of Ekman, looking at what was there. But Dacher, maybe talk a little bit about the types of theories that you really wanted to offer to the group as they were making this happen.

Dacher Keltner: Yeah. I mean, the two films, we should teach a class in university settings because it’s got all the science of emotion in it, from the corrugator muscle movement that goes up and down to that they playfully make fun of just how significant it is, to little vocal bursts to … They literally would ask questions as the films unfolded, like, “Well, if dopamine is part of Joy, what would it make the hair look like and the skin look like?” And I’d love to hear Maurissa’s thinking about the visuals of the different emotions.

But yeah, theoretically … And it’s fascinating because the two films follow the arc of emotion science, which is we began with the Ekman emotions, basic emotion theory, kind of the centerpiece of emotion science in some ways. Five emotions; anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, joy. Surprise didn’t make Inside Out 1. And the field has evolved as the films have evolved.

And so when I visited them, one of the first presentations to Kelsey and Meg was kind of a lot of new work on 25 emotions, new computational approaches, if you like that term, of which we do in our lab, Alan Cowan, like, “Wow, there are 25 emotions. They’re all blending and mixing and changing and evolving. Joy has many different facets which we see in this film.” And it’s a much richer space that I thought the film, this Inside Out 2, nailed it, right? What are the emotions we should privilege for a 13-year-old? The social self-conscious emotions, right? And that’s true scientifically.

So they got the broad theoretical arc of the evolution of emotion, how there are many more than what we used to think about. And then they got a lot of specific, I would get emails regularly of like, “How does emotion influence the sense of memory? Or with anxiety, what does it do to our sense of the future?” And there are studies showing if you feel anxious, you think you’re more likely to get hit by lightning, which is ridiculous, but that’s what the state is like. So it just covered the full range of theoretical perspectives in the field.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: And Lisa, what kind of theories did you lean on, research did you lean on, clearly the research body that you’ve produced, but what did you kind of lean on or share with folks?

Lisa Damour: See, the two big things that were … I don’t always know how much my influence is really there. Because what I’m working on is the shared body of knowledge. And I distill it, but I don’t want to take credit like, “Oh yeah, this was my …” But for what it’s worth. So there were two things where I was like, “Those were conversations we had.”

One was the resolution around allowing shortcomings to be integrated into the sense of self. I remember from our first conversation in that conversation about perfectionism, I remember saying, and this is actually the work of Nancy McWilliams, who’s a psychoanalyst who does beautiful clinical work, I remember quoting her to Kelsey and Meg because they were talking about it. I was like, “Well, do you want to know what we do clinically?” And they were like, “Yeah.” And I said, “Our job as clinicians is to help people acknowledge their shortcomings while still hold themselves at a reasonable level of self-regard. That’s the target outcome.” And I think those are Nancy’s words almost perfectly.

So it was so fun to watch that come into being. And then it’s such a quick little scene at the end, but I was like, “Oh yeah, That’s familiar.” Is it the end when they’re like, “Anxiety, here’s your chair. Sit in your chair.” And she’s saying all of this stuff that’s excessive, all of this irrational anxiety, overestimating the threat, underestimating the ability to deal with it. And they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then she goes, “But I have that Spanish test.” And they’re like, “Bingo!” And I was like, “Yes. That’s where anxiety is exactly doing her job.”

And so I think for me it’s really those clinical pieces around we don’t fight emotions, we just help people try to bring them in and keep them where they belong and put them to use. But we’re not in the business of banishing or preventing any of this. And so those were a couple of the places where I felt like it looked awfully familiar to the way I think about things.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It’s also another piece. I wonder if what you are saying by saying this, and also what the movie is saying, is allowing … It’s not explicit, but let me make it so, is telling folks what we do as a therapist. I think a lot of times, kids … Well, kids don’t come to me, kids get sent to me. So there’s that. But parents come to me with a desire to get rid of the bad thing. And I teach people how to live with the thing that’s already there.

So there is this kind of way that the movie really allows for the nuance. One of the couple questions about seeing Joy cry, what does that mean? Except for the complexity that you’re talking about, Dacher, what you’re referencing there. But there’s a secret way that this is actually talking about I think what therapy can do and also maybe helps me in my job, which is like, my job isn’t about getting away of the bad things. It’s about right sizing. I have to say that I yelled out loud in ways that embarrassed my children when I saw Anxiety in the chair. Because it was still there, had little anxiety. It was right sized, right? And that there was a function for her and it was like, “Yes.”

But you’ve both talked about these kinds of theories, clinical theories and emotion theories. Curious, Maurissa, as much as you saw or heard, how that impacted the characters, the size and shape of embarrassment, which I loved. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about, or these theories were impactful for that or the shine of Joy’s skin?

Maurissa Horwitz: Sure.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Were there things that came up around that?

Maurissa Horwitz: Sure. I mean, and I have to say, just every conversation that was had with Lisa and Dacher, it kept coming around in different meetings. Obviously the film just really evolved over time, but we kept going back to those mortals that we all connected with, even if we didn’t know the right name for the theories.

I will say even from the first Inside Out, a shape language for the emotions was very important to the filmmakers. So Joy is a star shape, her emotions are big. Sadness is a teardrop. Fear is an exposed nerve. And so I think that was taken into consideration when developing the new emotions. I love that Anxiety’s hair is as emotive as the rest of her. It changes with her state of mind. Embarrassment, the character, the emotion that wants to be seen the least is the biggest. So obviously, Envy being small and just wanting more from the world with these big eyes. Her eyes are the ones that change the most. She can get these anime eyes and stuff. Anyway, I just think the characters department did an amazing job really giving life and shape to the emotions that we know.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: We have this opportunity as well for you all to ask questions of each other. So I am curious, are there burning questions that you have for each other? It’s been maybe a minute since you’ve seen each other, the movie’s come out, but Dacher, Lisa, Maurisa, do you guys have questions of each other?

Lisa Damour: Well, I have a couple things that my kid noticed. I have a 13-year-old. None of this is accidental, but I’m just like, I’d love to know a little bit more of the back story. So two things. One is how we get those into the mom’s mind, into the dad’s mind. So my 13-year-old daughter was like, “Did you see that sadness is in the central spot in the mom’s mind and the anger is in the central spot in the dad’s mind?” So I’d love to hear a little bit about those conversations because I know that is no accident. And then the other thing which I had totally missed, she was like, “Mom, do you see that one of Ennui’s socks is not all the way on?” And it’s true. It’s like one sock is only pulled up. I was like, “Holy moly.” So I’d just love to hear more about how all this comes to be.

Maurissa Horwitz: Sure. Ennui just can’t be bothered to pull up all of her socks all the way. I mean, it’s teens who have a shoe untied all the time as they’re walking around. It’s that feeling. And her attachment to her phone is very resonant. But actually I’m hoping Dacher can talk a little bit more about the mom and dad’s mind, central emotion, just because that was all decided on the first movie and we kind of carried that through to this one. So yeah, I’m not sure.

Dacher Keltner: Yeah. I mean we did talk, there are a couple of nice reviews on gender differences and Lisa’s surveyed that literature, too. One of the reliable wins is women cry a little bit more, and that’s one of the only physiological differences in the emotion world for gender. And men get a little bit more angry. And so I think despite the tremendous overlap and those emotions for women and men and people with different gender identities, there is that difference that speaks to people, speaks to family dynamics and I thought manifest in the film.

And I guess to your prompt Allison, my question for Maurissa, I am astonished. You talked about the storylines and the way that the film not only goes from one person’s mind to another, which is incredibly hard narrative-wise, but it goes from inside to outside. I mean, I can’t even begin to … That’s what emotions do, is guide your mind and guide your behavior. How did you guys do that work as you put together the film?

Maurissa Horwitz: Yeah. And that was something that really, it just never stopped from day one ’til the final picture in terms of finding that balance. I will say that the first versions, we were learning way too much just in the outside world because it’s easier to tell the story there. And we learned that it’s a lot more fun, as much information as you can get inside Riley’s head to experience it through the emotions. That’s where we want to be as much as we can.

But we also realized that compared to the first one, we needed to be with Riley a little bit more in this movie because they are kind of social-relating emotions, these outward facing and self-conscious emotions. And so you did need to fully understand the social situations she was in to be able to really relate to the emotions and why she made the behavioral choices she did. So it was really a constant reworking, rebalancing.

You mentioned actually the kind of CSI, like going into Bree and Grace’s head with Riley when they’re noticing what’s going on in the car. And that came to us actually really late. We had told that scene in a more traditional way, but only going into Riley’s head and none of the lighting effects or fun CSI stuff. And I think we were kind of regrouping after one of the internal screenings and Pete and Kelsey were talking about like, “Oh, we’d love to have the feeling of that dinner scene from the first movie where you go into dad’s head and it’s got a very military feeling. What’s the equivalent for teenage girls?” And I was like, “Well, I feel …” I think, again, I hesitate to take credit for anything because these discussions keep going on for years and years. But I do kind of remember saying, “Well, girls are like detectives, like a crime investigation. That level of detail of pinpointing, expression changes and the micro changes in everybody.”

And so storyboard artists and writers took it and ran with it from there and it became this really fun, I think, dynamic scene of going into each of their heads and getting to experience it. But yeah, it’s just a lot of trial and error, to be honest.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Well, I think again, what you’ve elucidated is it’s a lot. It’s a lot of that. And I think it also just shows how much heart and intention and love has to go behind creating something to show this story. And again, there were hundreds of questions that we got that were really detailed about like, “Why this choice vs. that choice?” And I think we couldn’t answer all of them here, but we can kind of talk about, wow, this took a long, long time and there were lots and lots of choices and lots of people involved. But that last line of offering, what I’ll say is love, and loving the person just as you are, really took a lot of work to really show.

I am really curious as we do one kind of last round, if you all could just think about what’s something that you’re most proud of in this work. For you to speak just a little bit about that, something that you’re most proud of as you got a chance to be part of this process. So to give you a little bit of prep time, I’ll go with Dacher, then Lisa, then Maurissa. So now you’ve got a couple seconds to think about it. But just what are you most proud of and what do you hope people take away? So Dacher.

Dacher Keltner: Yeah, I’m proud that weird science, I think Lisa talked about emotions being vague and tricky phenomenological experiences is you can see it and it’s beautiful and it’s powerful and it’s dramatic and there are narratives to it. But you mentioned the word, Allison, self-compassion. I am around young people all the time. Young people are incredible today. They’re smarter, they work harder, they do amazing things and they’re more self-critical than probably in any time in human history.

And in this film, Lisa and I brought that concept to Kelsey. There’s Kristin Neff, Greater Good Science Center, self-compassion, just being kind to the self. I feel like the ending unfolding and the revelations about embracing all the complexity of ourselves and loving that is one of the great moments in Pixar film and film. And I’m really proud. I think a lot of young people are watching that and parents and it’s sinking in. So I’m very happy about that and proud.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Thank you. Lisa, how about for you?

Lisa Damour: Hard, right? I feel like it’s just been an honor. The whole thing has been a huge honor. It’s incredible to me that I did anything that warranted getting to hang out in this crowd with these geniuses and to see how far they can take a pretty straightforward conversation and turn it into this extraordinary thing.

So I think I feel proud by association, just to get to be part of something that … We become psychologists to be useful. If I helped at all, the scale of utility here, and then the timing about how badly we need this movie right this minute in our world, it’s an honor beyond all honor.

And I think in terms of what I want people to take away from that is, could we just do a little level setting here about typical adolescence and the nature of emotion? And if we could, if we could come to an agreement with the help of this film that being a teenager is a bumpy, painful process no matter what you do and uncomfortable emotions are just part of the deal, those two ideas alone would comfort so many people and reduce so much unnecessary distress. So anything I did to help get that idea out, I could basically hire everybody.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: That’s awesome. Thank you. And Maurissa, how about for you?

Maurissa Horwitz: It’s so hard. I mean, one, I’m proud of this team. Five hundred people worked on this movie. And they put so much love and work, many, many hours into it. And so to see it connecting with people around the world and starting conversations and possibly helping people, it is amazing. I work on animated movies. To have this kind of effect and get to be able to work with people like Dacher and Lisa and learn from them along the way while we’re making a movie, it’s phenomenal. But really just so much work and love was put into this movie and it just means so much that it’s connecting with people.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It certainly has connected with so many folks. And I think it also leaves such a profound opportunity for the level setting, for the connection. One thing that we didn’t talk about that we could do so really quickly is also how funny it was, and some of the not the self-critical humor that I thought was really amazing. So there was like, “Ouchy” is my favorite. I don’t know if there were other things that were just funny for you that you wanted to speak about, what you took away, but it would be incumbent upon us here at the Greater Good Science Center to end with the moment of joy and with the moment of something that just really sparks some joy for you. So any super quick 20 second sparks of joys that you all had, Dacher, Lisa, and Maurissa?

Dacher Keltner: Well, embarrassment …

Lisa Damour: I was …

Dacher Keltner: Sorry.

Lisa Damour: No, go ahead, Dacher.

Dacher Keltner: Embarrassment was funny and endearing and it’s an emotion we hate to experience, but it was really powerful for me.

Lisa Damour: Lance Slashblade’s name alone, much less his superpower.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: Yeah, yeah.

Lisa Damour: It was awesome. It just kills me. Absolutely kill me.

Maurissa Horwitz: Yeah. I’ll say it was a big priority to make this movie funny as well as have heart. And so it was just really fun to be in audiences now and hear people laughing. The vault was definitely Kelsey Mann, our director’s favorite scene as soon as we created it. So it was a lot of fun to work on. And I just think Maya was able to add humor to Anxiety and make her a fun character to be with, even while she’s spinning out of control, which was a real magic balancing act as well. So I don’t know. It was a lot of fun to work on.

Allison Briscoe-Smith: It was a of fun to watch. And also even that piece of Anxiety was just trying to protect her as being so important. What a gift you have all given us by imparting that message.

So the other thing we do here at Greater Good Science Center is I just want to end with gratitude. So on behalf of all the folks that are watching, all the people that sent in questions, just really want to thank you each for your thoughtfulness, your heart, your love, your compassion, your research, all the work, the years, the cutting board, all of that. And please know it’s meaningful and it’s impactful. So thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you all for your time and your work and effort. Deep appreciation. And know that the world’s just a little bit brighter because of you all. So thank you all so much. Appreciate your time.

Maurissa Horwitz: Thank you.

Lisa Damour: Thank you, Allison.

(Applause)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Outro: You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)