REGINA BARBER, HOST:
Warning SHORT WAVErs - this episode contains many spoilers for the new film "Inside Out 2." So continue at your own risk.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: You're listening to SHORT WAVE...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KWONG: ...From NPR.
BARBER: Pixar released "Inside Out" in 2015 to critical acclaim and had me and my daughter bawling in the theaters. It was a movie that focused on an 11-year-old named Riley moving from the Midwest to San Francisco. This move really shakes up her core emotions - joy, sadness, fear, disgust and anger. But as they try to make things better, they first make things worse.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BARBER: In the new film "Inside Out 2," Riley is 13 and settled in her new city. She has best friends and is thriving on the hockey team. But when puberty hits, and her friends tell her they won't be going to the same high school next year, things begin to change.
LISA DAMOUR: And with the arrival of adolescence come four new emotions that appear all at once and are wildly disruptive for Riley and her family.
BARBER: That's clinical psychologist Lisa Damour. Her most recent book is called "The Emotional Lives Of Teenagers," and it's aimed at helping parents support their teenagers while they go through this stage of their lives. It's work like this that made her an excellent scientific consultant for "Inside Out 2."
DAMOUR: So what's interesting about the evolution of the films is that it's actually also mapped onto the evolution of our science of emotion. So at the time that the first movie came out, there was this idea that there are these basic universal emotions. And we now identify at least 20 emotions that we see as universal and easily, you know, distinguished from one another. And so it makes sense from the scientific perspective to start to expand the landscape of Riley's emotional world.
BARBER: And for "Inside Out 2," Lisa helped Pixar welcome four new emotions to Riley's inner landscape - envy, embarrassment, ennui and...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "INSIDE OUT 2")
MAYA HAWKE: (As Anxiety) Hello.
AMY POEHLER, PHYLLIS SMITH, LEWIS BLACK, TONY HALE AND LIZA LAPIRA: (As Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, screaming).
HAWKE: (As Anxiety) I'm Anxiety. Where can I put my stuff?
BARBER: Riley goes through a similar emotional roller coaster as the first film. But this time, Anxiety takes over and locks Riley's core emotions in a Mason jar.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "INSIDE OUT 2")
AMY POEHLER: (As Joy) You can't just bottle us up.
TONY HALE: (As Fear) We are suppressed emotions.
BARBER: And for Lisa, getting to work on this movie has been a thrill, especially because she has teenagers of her own.
DAMOUR: So I got a call from Pixar in May of 2020 letting me know they wanted to talk with me about a film they were working on. I was so excited 'cause I loved the first film. And actually, my older daughter was the age of Riley at that time. And now I have a 13-year-old daughter. So in a very funny way, the - it's mapped onto my own parenting experience.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE GEORGIA'S "RECURRING THOUGHTS")
BARBER: Today on the show, art imitating life. Anxiety takes center stage as we get into its depiction in Pixar's "Inside Out 2" and how anxiety affects our brains in real life. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGE GEORGIA'S "RECURRING THOUGHTS")
BARBER: Lisa, so in "Inside Out 2," one morning Riley wakes up, and she's basically been launched into puberty, like, dealing with all of these new emotions. Is this depiction of puberty accurate?
DAMOUR: You know, it's surprisingly accurate, especially if you look at it from the perspective of what it feels like for the teenager and for the family. So she, you know, goes to bed one night and is a kid, and then the puberty alarm rings on the console...
BARBER: Right.
DAMOUR: ...And is suddenly extremely reactive to her mother, who's trying to have a conversation with her. And what is captured so beautifully in the film is the way in which the arrival of puberty sets off a cascading neurological set of events that cause emotions to be much more intense than they used to be. And it's so quick and comical in the film, but it's very, very accurate where her mother says something to her, and Riley, like, flips out on her mom, gets inexplicably angry. And it cuts to the inside of Riley's mind, and all of the emotions turn on Anger like, what are you doing? And he's like, I barely touched it.
BARBER: (Laughter) Yeah.
DAMOUR: I barely touched it.
BARBER: I liked that. Yeah.
DAMOUR: It's so funny. And Sadness does the same thing, and she's like, yeah, no, I barely touched it. This thing's broken. You know, and I think that's what it feels like for families. And I'm so glad that it's on the big screen so people don't have to worry that that means that something's wrong with them...
BARBER: Right.
DAMOUR: ...Or their kid.
BARBER: It's totally normal.
DAMOUR: Yep.
BARBER: So how is this pubescent brain, like, then different? Like, what is actually happening?
DAMOUR: So what's happening is actually the brain is upgrading.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAMOUR: It's becoming faster, more powerful, more efficient, and that involves pruning some neurons. It means adding some neurons. It means strengthening the connection between neurons. And the thing that happens - and this is - I guess you could say it's a bit of a design flaw - the brain remodels in the order in which it developed. And so that's from the back up to the more sophisticated, more, you know, modern regions, which are behind the forehead. And I guess the design hiccup maybe is that the emotions are housed in the more ancient regions. And so they get upgraded first. But the perspective-maintaining systems don't get fully upgraded until young adulthood.
BARBER: Right.
DAMOUR: And so there's a period - and this is really where we meet Riley - where teenagers have what we call a gawky brain, that their feelings...
BARBER: (Laughter).
DAMOUR: ...And their ability to have emotional reactions has been, you know, sort of improved.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAMOUR: But their ability to make - maintain perspective or get some distance on that experience is still lagging.
BARBER: So in this film, the new major character that's introduced is Anxiety, right? And (laughter) I love her. But for you, as a scientist, what did you think? Like, was there anything about her that really stood out to you?
DAMOUR: Well, the thing that was really interesting is in the evolution of the work on the film, Anxiety got a lot cuter.
BARBER: (Laughter).
DAMOUR: She was initially cast as a bit more of a villain.
BARBER: Right.
DAMOUR: And I'm really - you know, through conversations and through, you know, their own thinking and research, Kelsey Mann, the director, and Meg LeFauve, the writer, you know, came to a place of really treating her like, you know, she's one of the team. And it matters that she is adorable because you want her around and seen as a valuable partner to Riley and to the other emotions, so long as she's within bounds. And that's accurate.
We - as psychologists, we see anxiety as an important, valuable, protective and natural human emotion. We see it as having a healthy version, which is the kind that is accurately anticipating what could go wrong, having the right reaction to it, having the right strength of reaction. We only see anxiety as pathological if it's, you know, anticipating threats that aren't real or overreacting to potential problems. And so in terms of her relationships with the other feelings, I think that over the evolution of the film, she went from being sort of a bad guy on the outside to being treated as she should - as an uncomfortable but valuable emotion.
BARBER: Yeah. And for me, the most accurate depiction of what it feels like to have anxiety shows up when Riley's brain is hijacked by Anxiety, which means well but - spoiler alert - ultimately sends her into this, like, panic attack in the middle of her hockey game. Can you break down the moment Riley has this panic attack from, like, a clinical psychology standpoint?
DAMOUR: Sure. So panic attacks are actually surprisingly common. Many, many people will have panic attacks in their lives. And they're different from panic disorders. We don't see them as inherently pathological, though they are miserable to have. And, you know, she's put in the penalty box. And she starts to have a panic attack, and it's depicted so vividly.
BARBER: And so accurately to me. Like, I - it was so good.
DAMOUR: It was so good. You know, Anxiety is swirling and swirling and swirling around her. And that really captures what people talk about when they have panic attacks. It's a sense of feeling, like, cut off from themselves and cut off from everything around them and feeling, you know, like, that they just have lost all sense of place and time and - you know, very, very disorganizing to have a panic attack.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAMOUR: And then, you know, the ways in which she sort of pulls herself out, you know, starts to get in touch with the physical sensations around her.
BARBER: When she touches the wood, you know, like...
DAMOUR: Yes.
BARBER: ...I know that, like, my therapist is like, oh, just, like, touch something, tap something, you know, like...
DAMOUR: Yeah.
BARBER: ...Just to bring your brain out of it.
DAMOUR: Yeah. And we call that using grounding techniques. And that is part of, you know, how you get yourself through and out of a panic attack. And, you know, it was - I just - I was sort of just blown away by that part of the film when I saw it for the first time - just how aptly they capture an experience that is so uncomfortable and so unpleasant and also just the incredible tenderness that Joy brings in that moment and helps to pull Riley back and bring her back to herself. And, you know, the goal of - as clinicians, our goal is not to rid people of anxiety. Our goal is to help people manage anxiety if it gets to an irrational level.
BARBER: And how do we do that? Like, how do we work with it so that it can help us?
DAMOUR: So there's multiple pathways in. So the first is, you know, given the definition that irrational anxiety is about overestimating threats and underestimating the ability to manage them, we can then engage in questions like, you know - OK, so you say you're not going to have any friends in high school, right? So that's an overestimation of the threat. We can instead say, maybe you won't have as many friends as you want, right? So we're just bringing the threat estimation down a few notches.
And then if the person's like, I won't have any friends in high school, and there's nothing I can do about it, then we can be like, OK, so you may not have as many friends as you want. And, like, what could you do, right? If you aren't coming across the kids you want to hang out with, like, what options do you have available? - and helping people to find, you know, a sense of some, you know, agency and empowerment that can help them address the threat. So that's what we call a cognitive intervention - right? - where you're using your mind to ask questions that can help bring anxiety down to size.
There are also physiological interventions. When we become irrationally anxious, the heart rate accelerates a great deal.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAMOUR: Breathing gets quick and shallow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAMOUR: And this is all in the name of getting a whole lot of heavily oxygenated blood out to our large muscle groups so that we can run or attack. And interestingly, breathing can help reset the body.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAMOUR: So when we're anxious, we breathe in a way that's quick and shallow. When we deliberately override that and breathe in a way that is slow and deep, we hack into this network of nerves and send a competing message. And basically, the message is - we're safe.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BARBER: This is really speaking to me because I also suffer from these things and gotten much better over time with breathing and many things and talking, naming, like you said. But why do you think this was a film that needed to be made?
DAMOUR: You know, it's interesting. They got going with it at the height of the pandemic. And the pandemic led us into an adolescent mental health crisis and has us appropriately concerned about teenagers and how they're doing. But one unintended consequence of that is that I am now caring for teenagers and families who are more uneasy than they need to be about psychological distress.
So I've cared for teenagers for almost 30 years and have known from that work, like, the ups and downs are part of being a teenager. And a great deal of dysregulation is part of being a teenager. And so the value of this movie now is so - you know, it's so well timed because we really do need the level setting that being a teenager, having a teenager is an inherently challenging thing and that uncomfortable and unwanted emotions are not, on their own, grounds for concern.
BARBER: They're natural.
DAMOUR: They're part of life. They're protective. They're valuable. They're growth-giving. They guide us.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGIA NICHOLAS WINTER'S "OPULENCE")
BARBER: Thank you so much for talking to us about "Inside Out." I love these movies. And I'm glad we got to talk to you.
DAMOUR: Well, thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGIA NICHOLAS WINTER'S "OPULENCE")
BARBER: This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our show runner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Rachel and me. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Collin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGIA NICHOLAS WINTER'S "OPULENCE")
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.