What an emotionally rich summer of 2024, thanks to the new critically acclaimed Pixar movie, Inside Out 2. The newest animated feature from Disney’s subsidiary is the biggest blockbuster of the year so far, reaching $1 billion at the box office in just 19 days.

Inside Out 2 succeeds thanks to the film’s engaging storytelling, empathetic characters, and high-quality animation combined with robust content about emotions. Pixar’s creative teams worked with well-known scientific experts, initially consulting with Paul Ekman on the first movie and then Lisa Damour and Dacher Keltner on the second. Both films resonate with adults, teens, and pre-teens because they’re genuine.

The five animated humanized emotions from the original 2015 Inside Out – Joy, Fear, Rage, Disgust and Sadness – are back at work in the sequel. Reunited and collaborating at their mission control operations center, the five emotions focus on managing their human charge, Riley. Yet they quickly discover that their tiniest touch on the controls now has a disproportionate response on the now 13-year-old. Riley no longer is staying relatively even keeled; instead, she is often tearing up and having temper tantrums.

Yes, Riley has entered puberty! The new film’s plot takes place just two years after the ending of the first Inside Out movie (even though they were produced nine years apart). Riley’s now navigating several new challenging experiences at ice-hockey camp

Riley’s internal life has become more complex too, especially now that four new emotions – Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy and Ennui – have joined her five core emotions at the mission control ops center.

Anxiety quickly takes over pushing all the other emotions around, rather than cooperating with them. Until now, the five core emotions have worked together as a team for Riley. While Anxiety means well, she’s obsessed with all the bad things that could happen to Riley in the future, starting tomorrow. Anxiety is so worried about how Riley could screw everything up that Anxiety assumes responsibility for predicting what could go wrong for Riley on and off the hockey rink and planning accordingly.

Joy recognizes that Anxiety is not always negative, but she is chaotic. Compared with the other emotions, Anxiety is always in motion and looks just as wild as she acts. She’s got messy hair, bulging eyes, and a grin the size of a canoe, with uneven teeth. Toward the end of the movie, Anxiety starts spinning out of control like an orange tornado.

By the movie’s closing credits, adults, teens and pre-teens alike can glean these three key messages:    

• We humans are emotional beings. (And yes, we bring our emotions to work.)
• We need to be in touch with all of our emotions. Suppressing emotions causes more harm than good.
• Anxiety is multi-faceted and plays an important role in helping manage our physical and mental state, our beliefs, and our actions. Anxiety also aids in preparing us for the future, including all the uncertainty it brings.

Ideally, Pixar will create additional Inside Out sequels since there’s practically infinite content to explore. Consider all of the potential life events Riley will face: high school graduation, college, her first job, love interests, parenting, mid-life, retirement, etc.

Future films also could delve into feelings as well as emotions, which would explain the workings of the inner self more thoroughly. This is the purview of neuroscientists more so than the psychologists who have served as the Pixar scientific advisors to date. As background, neuroscience takes a more integrative approach between the brain and body. By contrast, psychology primarily focuses on behavior, including how emotions and one’s mental state affects actions.

Your feelings are valuable because they’re the meanings you give to the emotions you have experienced. Being aware of this nuance helps you be more aware of your emotions and interpret them more accurately. Plus this awareness helps you understand how people can have very different reactions and feelings even when they think they’re sharing the same experience. That’s because individuals interpret their feelings by how their body responds to their emotions elicited from their past experiences.

As Dr. Justin James Kennedy emphasizes in my continuing neuroplasticity studies through the npnHub, neuroscience considers two types of signals. The networks in your brain send signals that shape your emotions and emotional experiences. The body sends signals that influence how you feel, a la your feelings.

If you’re interested, here’s how neuroscientists distinguish among affect, emotions, and feelings:

• Affect refers to how we experience a feeling or emotion. There are positive affects, such as states of joy, excitement, and contentment. Negative affects include sadness, anger and fear. Anxiety, such as stress, is also an affect.
• Emotion is an intense short-lived affective state that’s often triggered by specific events. Your emotions serve as a short cut to determine the extent to which you’re encountering a threatening or rewarding situation. Your brain is constantly monitoring what’s happening around you and then determines, based on past experiences, whether you’re facing a risk or reward. This happens within a fifth of a second, automatically and nonconsciously, according to Dr. Evian Gordon.
• Feelings are the subjective sensation of the emotion you experience, that is how you physically respond to the emotion. About half a second after experiencing the emotion, your body becomes consciously aware of the feeling generated by the emotion, based on Dr. Gordon’s research. The signal you notice can be an increase in your breathing, your heart rate, and sweating to your skin, or gut intuition. In other words, your felt experience is the emotion you’re processing. For example, Riley often blushed with embarrassment in Inside Out 2 but neither she nor the emotions talked about it.
• Mood are affective states of arousal that are more prolonged and less intense than emotions are. They can exist without a specific identifiable trigger and can be telegraphed to others, including being contagious. (The character Ennui in Inside Out illustrates her mood beautifully.)

If this seems complex, it is. We humans are complex beings, which we need to acknowledge, appreciate and accept, ideally without judgment. We are unique both on the inside and outside.