In the first movie of the Inside Out franchise, the actions of eleven-year old Riley are controlled by five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. In Inside Out 2, Riley has become a teenager, and, in what seems to be a clever representation of adolescent emotional turbulence, the Headquarters of Riley’s mind now houses four more emotions: Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment, and last but not least, Anxiety.

 

I cannot be the only one who feels that Headquarters has become uncomfortably, awkwardly crowded with this arrangement. The movie itself seems conscious of this: it spends most of its runtime dividing the old and new emotions into two separate settings, with the former being sent on a journey to retrieve Riley’s Sense of Self and the latter wreaking havoc at Headquarters. And when the emotions reunite for a happy ending, they stand scattered around the control panel in a group so large that it is hard to decide which of them to focus on.

 

Upon looking into the minds of Riley’s mother and father, however, we are assured that this phase won’t last. Mom and Dad’s Anxiety do make a small appearance, but unlike the five original emotions, they do not take center stage in the parents’ psyches. Is this to say, then, that as we grow up, we are less capable of feeling anxiety, envy, ennui, and embarrassment? This does not seem plausible either. So where do these new emotions go when puberty ends?

 

But there is another, perhaps more curious, development: the five original emotions begin to exhibit behaviors typical of emotions that they don’t represent. When Disgust meets Lance Slashblade, one of Riley’s fictional crushes, Disgust acts girlish and playful rather than feeling revolted. It is strange because her romantic inclinations have no connection to the emotion she represents – and here, more than anything, she is reminiscent of a pre-teen girl deluded by her admiration of a celebrity.

 

It doesn't stop there. Sadness stops crying once she’s back in Headquarters, firmly telling Anxiety that ‘this isn’t who Riley is.’ And when the other emotions complain and insult Joy for persevering with their mission, she completely loses it: she spits out a string of curses, she admits that she is hurt, and she collapses in defeat – musing as a tear rolls down her eye: ‘Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less Joy.’ 

 

We see this pattern in Riley’s mother, too, whose control panel only displays the five original emotions. All five emotions seem to have emotions of their own: unlike Riley's Anger, Mom’s Anger is wry and sarcastic rather than prone to outbursts. In the first movie, when Riley appears upset about her first day at school, Mom’s Sadness is decisive instead of inconsolable, strategically instructing the other emotions to ‘probe’ Riley without being too obvious. Dad’s Anger, too, demonstrates a capacity for panic when Mom gives him a look. But is it even possible for emotions to have emotions, to exhibit a capacity for individual judgement? 

 

To find out, we need not look further than Headquarters’s new mechanism, the Sense of Self: the Sense of Self contains Riley’s beliefs about her own identity, which are formed with hundreds of defining memories. At the beginning of the movie, her Sense of Self is healthy, and when strummed, it harps out her belief that she is a good person, a good friend, and a winner. When Anxiety stages a coup against Joy, and replaces the happy memories in Riley’s belief system with a flood of anxious ones, a new, maligned Sense of Self grows in Headquarters, which repeatedly declares: “I’m not good enough.”

 

The Sense of Self represents a nod to Erik Erikson’s seven psycho-social stages, which indicates that Riley is still in the identity versus role confusion stage of development. At this point in her life, she is actively trying to figure out who she is — or, as it were, which personas fit her best. 

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Because what the confident Sadness or hopeless Joy or romantic Disgust seek to demonstrate, and what the Sense of Self points to, is that Riley’s emotions are growing up as well. Headquarters is maturing to house versions of the self, rather than just emotions. After all, when did we last fail to control, inhibit, or mask our emotions? Do we not act in accordance with our perceptions of who we are, rather than being unreservedly controlled by our emotions? Why, then, should emotions be in control of Headquarters, and not personas with the capacity for better judgement? And so what I originally thought were inconsistencies of character turn out to be an observation about growing up. 

 

Indeed, the appearance of new emotions as personas point to the adolescent preoccupation with the search for identity. Riley’s competing selves are multifaceted and multitudinous, as she is still struggling to find out who she is as a person. For her parents, both of whom have a stabilized sense of self, the five original emotions are often in agreement with one another. When Dad’s original emotions — or shall we say, personas — stream a memory of an exciting hockey match, they all cheer and seem to exhibit the same personality. When Mom is frustrated with Dad, all her personas have the capacity to be infatuated with the Brazilian helicopter pilot. 

 

Meanwhile, the new emotions – Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment – remain mere emotions, and never develop into personas that control an individual’s actions. This is reflected by the fact that they don’t have permanent seats at the control panels in the minds of the adults. As we grow, we stop being controlled by our emotions; our actions are instead defined by our sense of self. 

 

Joy is wrong. Just because she begins to feel sadness and desperation doesn’t mean that there is less joy to go around. In fact, the capacity for joy is distributed more evenly across Riley’s personas: Disgust decides to unleash the avalanche of bad memories in order to ride it back to Headquarters in a courageous display of optimism. Fear gets ready to jump in the middle of a Brainstorm, shouting to Joy that ‘the only way out is up!’ Anger proudly shows off his new friend, Pouchy, and promises confetti regardless of whether Riley makes the hockey team. No, indeed. We don’t feel less joy as we grow up: we just become more complex.