HOW MANY EMOTIONS?
The hit movie Inside Out turns feelings into animated characters — five of them, to be exact. But it’s unclear how many emotions we truly experience
We ask a psychology professor whether the hit animated film Inside Out got it right,
In an interview with NPR soon after the launch of his latest Pixar megahit, Inside Out, writer/director Pete Docter said he found it “kind of baffling” that scientists have yet to come to a consensus on how many emotions jockey for attention in the human brain. “Some guys would say, well, there’s three basic emotions, and then someone else would tell us there’s 27 basic emotions. And we’re like, what?”
The film’s entire premise hangs on an exploration of the mental events of the film’s saucer-eyed 11-year-old protagonist, Riley Anderson. So Docter needed to pick a number. In the end, he settled on five of these so-called “basic” or fundamental emotions — joy, fear, disgust, anger and sadness — each anthropomorphized as celebrity-voiced animated characters. (Amy Poehler as Joy has drawn the most positive review ink, but
The Office’s Phyllis Smith is exemplary as Sadness, whose chief coping strategy is to swoon onto the floor into a state of lamentation.)
The film is an entertaining representation of a highly popularized theory and one that retains prominent currency in the world of psychology. But is it accurate? Or is the theory it’s based on out of date?
Lisa Feldman Barrett is buried deep in her writing bunker at the moment, tackling this very topic in a book entitled How
Emotions Are Made, due out next spring. But as a born and bred Torontonian, the university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston is happy to step away from pressing deadlines to poke holes in this socalled “essentialist” view of emotions.
“Nobody can agree on which emotions are basic and which ones aren’t, and that’s because the whole thing’s a fiction,” Barrett says. “There’s never been any set of inclusion or exclusion criteria that anybody has ever been able to agree upon to say which emotions deserve to be classified as ‘basic.’ ”
In 1990, two American academics produced a confounding roundup of previous attempts to define a set of emotions.
Before the turn of the 20th century, renowned psychologist and philosopher William James concluded there were four fundamental emotions: fear, grief, love and rage. Magda Arnold, circa 1960, opted for 11: anger, aversion, courage, dejection, desire, despair, fear, hate, hope, love and sadness.
William McDougall itemized seven, including “wonder,” which appears in Sanskrit texts dating as far back as the third century AD. Some psychologists choose “pleasure” over desire or love. (Sanskrit scholars opt for the more explicit “sexual desire.”) Meanwhile American psychologist Paul Ekman, whose core list of six emotions — anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise — is the most frequently cited contemporary reference, appears to avoid intimacy altogether. As for “surprise,” is that even an emotion?
The declared bases for inclusion of each of the so-called basic emotions have been inconsistent across time. One psychologist based his short list on “relation to action tendencies.”
Ekman’s work is rooted in facial expressions — his early research focused on having subjects match perceived emotions to photographs of posed faces displaying, say, a broad smile or a scowl. These experiments led Ekman to conclude that emotions are universal, and he has built an extensive corporate empire selling emotional awareness courses to companies and teaching facial observation techniques to “behavioural detection officers” at airports.
“It’s the most popular flavour of a whole class of theories which say there are a set of emotions that are evolutionarily preserved, each of which has its own facial expression, its own pattern of physiological responses in the body, its own circuitry in the brain and so on and so forth,” says Barrett.
She doesn’t buy it. Barrett rejects the idea that each emotion has a “universal biological fingerprint” or that there’s a universal language of emotions. “They weren’t em-
pirically discovered; they were stipulated," she says, hearkening back to Charles Dar win’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
“Nobody’s ever shown empirically that people routinely pout when they are sad, or that they don’t pout for other reasons." The pout, in other words, is not a diagnostically valid signal of sadness. "Nobody's ever verified that people make these facial expressions in a consistent and specific way, either in our culture or outside it."
That theory, she argues, has potentially harmful effects, from how doctors handle patients to how lawyers, judges and juries make decisions. “In the Canadian legal system, if you show sadness and remorse during the sentencing phase of your trial, it can mitigate your sentence, and failure to show remorse will almost dictate the most severe sentence that you can have," Barrett says “So you have people believing there is a true signature for remorse and sadness in your face . . . when that's actually not true."
In an interview with the Atlantic maga
zine earlier this year, Ekman, who expanded his list of basic emotions to include interest, shame and contempt, insisted that the evidence for universality is “extremely strong and robust, statistically,” with respondents across cultures identifying the emotion categories on average 58 per cent of the time.
The more precise answer likely lies in employing methods that are scientifically sharper than asking participants to make posed expressions in response to trigger words. Facial electromyography, which spontaneously measures facial muscle response through electrodes, is one.
Too much of this talk could take the fun out of Inside Out. Barrett applauds the creativity of the film — she was particularly taken with the cubist representation of abstract thought — and joins the chorus of fans who commend the way it authenticates the value of negative emotions.
As for the cartoon neuroscience? There’s robust evidence to argue against the belief that emotion categories can be isolated to precise regions in the brain. But the movie’s depiction doesn’t overly bother Barrett. She puts it this way — as a Road Runner fan, she doesn’t base her understanding of intuitive physics on Wile E. Coyote. “We know that if you run off a cliff you’ll fall, even if you don’t look down.”