How Did Dr. John Schinnerer Add Depth to Pixar’s Inside Out?

Dr. John Schinnerer provided expert consultation to Pixar’s new hit, Inside Out.

Dr. John Schinnerer Added Scientific Advice to Inside Out

When Dr. John Schinnerer, who holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology from UC Berkeley, attended the premiere of the record-breaking Pixar movie Inside Out at their Emeryville campus, he was honored to have had a hand in it’s creation. According to Dr. John, ‘This movie has the opportunity to improve how people view their mental landscape – the thoughts and emotions taking place in their head.’

People aren’t typically comfortable identifying, or admitting to, difficult emotions, such as anger, fear and sadness. Along with joy and disgust, these emotions play a central role in the head of the movie’s female hero, Riley, who grapples with anger and sadness following her family’s move from Minnesota to San Francisco.

So a movie such as Inside Out, which personifies positive and negative emotions and demonstrates how they can disagree AND work together to overcome adversity normalizes peoples’ internal experience. It can be a powerful tool for all audience members. In fact, one person, sitting behind Dr. John at the premiere commented, ‘I feel like I just sat through a college Psychology class.’

‘It is my hope that Inside Out becomes part of our vocabulary in terms of what it means to be a fully functioning, happy human being, and part of that means recognizing and allowing for emotions’ says Dr. John.

Dr. Schinnerer served as a consultant to Pete Docter, Jonas Rivera (whom directed and produced Up and Monsters, Inc.) and others during their ground research. Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman also advised on the film.

One of the key insights in the film is the idea that everyone seems to have a ‘signature emotion.’ This is seen inside the minds of Riley’s father who internal world is driven by anger, in Riley’s mother whose mind is led by sadness and in Riley, whose mind is steered by joy (for the most part!).

The movie just opened up to rave reviews last weekend. Go see for yourself what the fuss is about!

How Many Basic Emotions Are There?

Short answer: it depends on who is counting. Paul Ekman’s classic research identified six basic emotions that people recognize across cultures: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Inside Out gave Riley five of them: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. Inside Out 2 added four more as Riley hit her teens: Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment. That is where the “nine emotions” come from.

The science has moved past a short list. In a 2017 UC Berkeley study, Alan Cowen and Dacher Keltner had people report what they felt while watching more than 2,000 short videos, and found 27 distinct categories of emotion with fuzzy boundaries between them (Cowen & Keltner, 2017). Anxiety shades into fear. Awe shades into admiration. Real emotional life is more of a spectrum than a control panel with five buttons.

Why the Number Matters Less Than the Naming

Here is what I care about as a coach. A lot of men I work with run on about three emotions: fine, stressed, and pissed off. Everything else gets filed under one of those. The more precisely you can name what you are feeling (disappointed, embarrassed, left out), the more choices you have about what to do with it. That is the real gift of Inside Out. It handed a whole generation a vocabulary.

If you want to build that skill, start with the signs of high emotional intelligence. Sign #5, emotional granularity, is exactly this.

Sources: Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3–4), 169–200. Cowen, A. S., & Keltner, D. (2017). Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients. PNAS, 114(38), E7900–E7909. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1702247114