“Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?” 

That’s what Joy, a personified emotion, questions in Pixar’s Inside Out (2015). A family-friendly adventure, the film predominantly follows 11-year-old Riley as her parents relocate from her Minnesota home to the unfamiliar San Francisco. But alongside the colourful animations and lessons about growing up, Inside Out also provides food for thought when it comes to the very nature of our emotions and how they impact our lives. 

In Inside Out’s imagined world, individuals are guided by five personified emotions working inside the mind: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness. The core tension of the film arises as Joy, in an attempt to keep Riley happy, prevents Sadness from influencing any of the young girl’s reactions to the outside world – with increasingly negative consequences. 

By trying to solve all of Riley’s problems with happiness – despite the changing world around Riley being decidedly ‘unhappy’ – Joy inadvertently causes Riley to retreat inside herself and become numb to the outside world. 

Was Joy’s mistake thinking that Riley’s emotions existed distinctly within the safety of her mind, separate from the external world? Does viewing emotions as singular experiences hamper our understanding of their true impact and complexity? 

Social emotions

Emotions have traditionally been studied as physiological occurrences – controlled by the hardwiring of our brains, and as such, universal and unchanging. But Dutch social psychologist Batja Mesquita, author of Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (2022), has spent years looking into the cultural side of emotions, and makes a different case. 

Mesquita is a professor of psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of Leuven. She focuses on the role of culture in emotions, and of emotions in culture and society.

“We’re constantly creating each other’s context for feeling emotions,” she explains. “We as people create the purpose for emotions – we say, this is the right moment to feel this.”

Our emotions, unlike how Joy initially thinks of them, cannot be controlled solely from within our minds with a few flicks of a switch. Instead, psychologists are beginning to view emotions as things that occur in between people. In short, emotions are beginning to be understood as collective, rather than individual. 

Mesquita describes a hypothetical child falling over. They look up, waiting to see what the reaction is from the adults around them. As their parents rush over in concern, the child realises that what has happened is scary and painful – and the tears begin. This is one example of how emotions, according to Mesquita, are influenced by the people around us, and on a larger scale, by entire cultures and societies. 

“The meaning of the event is more or less created by the bystanders around the individual; they experience emotions based on others’ reactions,” she explains. 

When she moved to the US to study, Mesquita was told by peers that she came across as rude or ungrateful. In one instance, after having dinner at a new friend’s house, she left to go home without saying thank you – a sign of closeness and familiarity in the Netherlands. 

But in the US, it upset her hosts; to them, she was being ungrateful, rather than displaying informality and ease. Mesquita, intrigued by such a stark difference in emotional responses, began researching the differences in emotion across culture. 

“In Western culture, we think of emotions primarily as these feelings inside us. But in many Eastern cultures, like in Japan, people think of emotions primarily as things that happen between you,” she tells me. 

She explains that in one study, American and Japanese participants were shown pictures of people. When asked about a smiling individual in the picture, American participants concluded they were happy. But the Japanese participants would only state that the individual was happy if the other people in the background of the picture were also happy. If someone in the background looked angry, they would conclude that the main subject of the picture was less happy, or even felt slightly angry. 

Mesquita summarises that the more individualistic US society determined American participants’ response to the images: “While we often think of emotions as an individual, internal feeling, a lot of what we know about emotions now is that they are prompted by and embedded in the relationships with others and society.” 

If emotions are a shared endeavour, how can we use them to better understand ourselves, others and our place in the world?

Don’t get emotional 

Why do we cry at sad films? Why do we snap at our partner after a long day at work that ended with missing the train home? Why do we feel euphoric at a concert that our favourite band is playing? 

The purpose of our emotions is difficult to pinpoint, but broadly they help us to make sense of the world around us and forge connections with others. And they are found everywhere: not just in our personal lives. Think about the number of interactions you have with colleagues in a single day of work. How many of those are driven by affection and camaraderie? How many are driven by frustration and anger? How many are driven by ambition and excitement? 

Even the biggest international corporation is made up of individual people, each with their own thoughts, dreams, fears and feelings. Removing emotions from the workplace entirely is like trying to remove the salt from the sea – it’s possible to take some of it out, but we must accept that we are fundamentally driven by a tide of emotions. 

Rather than trying to ignore our emotions in certain contexts, it’s more productive to shift our mindset around them. Instead of internalising our emotions and thinking of them them as unique and personal – coined as ‘MINE’ emotions in Mesquita’s book (mental, inside the person, essentialist) – we can instead think of emotions as a way to impact and inspire others around us by thinking of them as ‘OUR’ emotions (outside the person, relational, situated). 

“We feel something about a situation, so we are motivated to take action,” Mesquita explains. “When others are involved in the same emotion it can expand to inspire whole cultures or societies to drive change. It’s what I call trying to follow the emotion inside out.” 

Joy’s stubborn commitment to preventing Riley from expressing her fear and sadness leads to Riley’s emotions operating outside in – absorbing the external factors of homesickness and change without reflecting outward emotional reactions to the people around her. 

It’s only when Riley finally shares her emotions that she is able to experience connection, understanding and support: “I know you don’t want me to, but I miss home,” she tells her father. His response is one that confirms the act of shared emotion through his compassion – a word that literally means ‘suffering with another’: “We’re not mad. You know what? I miss Minnesota too.” 

Once Riley expresses her sadness, it becomes a shared experience. Her homesickness now brings a new dimension of connection and support, with her predominant feeling becoming love for her parents rather than sadness for her old life. In Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (2022), she explores the role that Sadness plays in Inside Out, and why as an emotion, it is so inherently communal: “The sadness from which compassion springs is a pro-social emotion, an agent of love and connection.” 

Cain also talks to the film’s consulting academic, Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Keltner was responsible for shifting the focus of the film from Joy and Fear, as it was originally pitched, to Joy and Sadness. He summarises to Cain why sadness is such an important social emotion: “Caring is right at the heart of human existence. Sadness is about caring. And the mother of sadness is compassion.” 

Our emotions don’t just exist in isolation. Beginning to recognise the extent to which our emotions are shared reminds us of one of our greatest skills as humans: caring for others.