It’s the delightful Pixar movie portraying the conflicting emotions of an 11 year-old girl grappling with the difficulties of a move from Minnesota to San Francisco.
Indeed, the emotions are characters themselves: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and Joy.
The film’s producers consulted psychologists who wrote a piece in the New York Times saying that people generally misunderstand emotions and that the movie generally characterized emotions pretty accurately.
[E]motions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.
But the truth is that emotions guide our perceptions of the world, our memories of the past and even our moral judgments of right and wrong, most typically in ways that enable effective responses to the current situation. For example, studies find that when we are angry we are acutely attuned to what is unfair, which helps animate actions that remedy injustice.
