Pixar’s Inside Out and the Depiction of Emotions • Pixar’s movie Inside Out is based on real science, according to articles by Pixar employees and consulting scientists. • Pixar is skilled at infusing emotions into various characters, including cars, robots, and even a cockroach in Walee. • While cleverly depicted, the film’s portrayal of the classical view and abstraction is incorrect. • Inside Out reflects a Western or Eurocentric stereotype of how emotions function, which some people believe. Transcript: Speaker 1 Well, if you read, if you read the articles about it that were given by people at Pixar and also by the scientists who consulted on the film, they would not tell you that it was just a cute, Silly movie. They would tell you that it was depicting real science. I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it. Go read the articles yourself. That’s what they say. And my answer is, you know what, I love Pixar films. I’ve seen every Toy Story film probably four times. Pixar is great at putting emotions into everything, into cars, into robots, into a cockroach. I mean, a cockroach, right, in Walee. It’s like the most adorable little creature who loves a cockroach, but it was great. So they put emotions into everything, including now into humans in a way that I thought the depiction of the classical view is very clever. I thought their depiction of abstraction was really clever. It’s wrong, but it was clever. So you know, and I would also say that, I mean, I love Roadrunner and, you know, Coyote cartoons too, but I don’t expect that I’m really going to learn how physics works from watching a Roadrunner cartoon, you know. So I think that the, I think that inside out reflects a sort of a Western or Eurocentric stereotype of how emotions work. And some people adhere to that stereotype. (Time 0:12:42)
The Inside Out Model and the Complexities of Emotions • The inside out model in the movie does not follow its own model. • The characters in the inside out model exhibit a wide range of emotions contrary to their stereotypes. • The essentialist view is that anger is a singular thing with a set of characteristics. Transcript: Speaker 1 Well the inside out model, I should say even the inside out model doesn’t even follow their own model. Okay, so the inside out model is that there is, you know, you have a little, a little circuit in your brain, which is depicted in this movie, right, by these little people, these little Characters. Like so you’ve got one for anger, one for sadness, one for fear and so on. But even anger, the little character anger doesn’t behave. I mean, if you look at his facial movements, he’s not always scowling or blowing his top. Sometimes he cries, sometimes he smiles, sometimes he, right? Like, well, anger shouldn’t be any of those things by the stereotype. It should just be, you know, blowing your coop, blowing your stack. Sure. But and every single one of the characters does this, right? They have this like huge range of the huge variety. And so there are a number of ways to describe how the views are different. But one way is that in the view that is, I guess, I don’t want to say depicted by inside out because the actual characters don’t depict this. But one, the sort of the view, the essentialist view is that, you know, anger is one thing. That’s why we refer to anger. We talk about anger is if we know what anger is, it’s a thing. It has a set of characteristics, not every single instance of anger. (Time 0:16:09)
No existe una “huella dactilar” fija para cada emoción. Transcript: Speaker 1 There’s a stereotype that people have about what anger looks like and feels like and how it’s caused. But the actual instances are highly variable. That is, sometimes when you’re angry, you feel unpleasant. But sometimes you feel pleasant. Sometimes when you’re angry, your blood pressure goes up, but actually sometimes it goes down. It all depends on the action that you’re taking because your physiology is linked to your physical movements and the physical movements you make in anger depend on the situation. So even the brain bases of anger depends to some extent on your situation. And I should point out, I’m not saying it’s all like random noise. There’s structured variation in the evidence that is predictable if you measure it properly. So this introduces a really interesting question. (Time 0:19:06)
cerebro construcción emociones predicción teoría
cerebro emociones predicción teoría
Understanding Variability in Anger Interpretation • Introducing an interesting question: how do you identify anger in a given instance? • The book aims to explain the concept of identifying anger. • Physiological signals can be interpreted differently depending on the context. • Different interpretations of signals can lead to different emotions. • The brain constantly makes meaning of signals to create emotions. Transcript: Speaker 1 So this introduces a really interesting question. And that is, if there’s all this variability in how in the instances of anger that you see in other people and what you yourself do in anger and how anger feels, how the hell do you know it’s Anger in a given instance? Like what does that question even mean? And that’s what the book attempts to explain. Speaker 3 When I’ve spoken to people about this, the idea that how they, you know, correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but that there’s scope to interpret the physiological signals differently Depending on the context and that. So you could have exactly the same physiological signals, but you could be in a different context and that could lead to a different interpretation, which would lead to a different Emotion. Speaker 1 Almost, I would say that it leads to a different interpretation, which leads to a different emotion. I would say your brain is a meaning maker. It’s making meaning of signals. And when it does this all the time as it’s been all the time, that is the emotion. (Time 0:20:00)
Understanding the Complexity of Interpreting Anger and Emotion • Introducing the question of identifying anger in different contexts. • The book attempts to explain how to recognize anger. • Physiological signals can be interpreted differently depending on context. • Interpreting signals leads to different emotions. • The brain is constantly making meaning of signals to create emotions. • Avoid the mechanistic mistake of interpreting physiological signals as the emotion itself. Transcript: Speaker 1 So this introduces a really interesting question. And that is, if there’s all this variability in how in the instances of anger that you see in other people and what you yourself do in anger and how anger feels, how the hell do you know it’s Anger in a given instance? Like what does that question even mean? And that’s what the book attempts to explain. Speaker 3 When I’ve spoken to people about this, the idea that how they, you know, correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but that there’s scope to interpret the physiological signals differently Depending on the context and that. So you could have exactly the same physiological signals, but you could be in a different context and that could lead to a different interpretation, which would lead to a different Emotion. Speaker 1 Almost, I would say that it leads to a different interpretation, which leads to a different emotion. I would say your brain is a meaning maker. It’s making meaning of signals. And when it does this all the time as it’s been all the time, that is the emotion. Right. So there’s a mechanistic kind of mistake when we say, well, so these physiological signals happen and then we interpret them. (Time 0:20:00)
El desarrollo de predicciones ES creación de sentido Transcript: Speaker 1 Almost, I would say that it leads to a different interpretation, which leads to a different emotion. I would say your brain is a meaning maker. It’s making meaning of signals. And when it does this all the time as it’s been all the time, that is the emotion. Right. So there’s a mechanistic kind of mistake when we say, well, so these physiological signals happen and then we interpret them. And then an emotion issues from that. You’re basically saying a causes, b causes, c, but actually the causation in that in that language is not correct is to the best of my current understanding. So the first thing is that the physiology is caused by the meeting making or back to basically the physiology is the meaning making. That is when your brain makes this, it doesn’t evaluate stuff and then create a set of signals. It’s predicting based on what’s happening now, it’s predicting the set of signals that are about to happen in a minute from now. And it’s creation of those predictions is the meaning making. It is the categorization. It is the construction. It’s the beginning of the construction of the of the emotion or of the event. (Time 0:20:49)
cerebro interpretación predicción sentido
cerebro interpretación predicción sentido
Physiology and meaning making in the brain • Physiology is the process of meaning-making in the brain. • The brain predicts future signals based on present information. • Meaning-making is the construction and categorization of emotions or events. • The conventional mechanistic way of thinking may not be correct. • Objects don’t inherently possess features or properties, they are relational. • The property of redness is a result of signals and brain interpretation. • Redness exists in the relationship between objects. • The relational view in physics parallels the concept of meaning-making. Transcript: Speaker 1 Physiology is caused by the meeting making or back to basically the physiology is the meaning making. That is when your brain makes this, it doesn’t evaluate stuff and then create a set of signals. It’s predicting based on what’s happening now, it’s predicting the set of signals that are about to happen in a minute from now. And it’s creation of those predictions is the meaning making. It is the categorization. It is the construction. It’s the beginning of the construction of the of the emotion or of the event. So I think this is something that people have a really hard time understanding because we’re all used to thinking in this kind of mechanistic way of like a causes, b causes, c, but I don’t Think that that’s correct. And I should also say that, and this is a really hard thing that, okay, and maybe, maybe it requires more explanation that we’re used to thinking of objects having features or properties, Right, like an apple is red, but actually an apple isn’t red. The property of redness is a relational property that exists because of the signals hitting your retina. And also the way that your brain is making sense of those signals. So the redness isn’t only in your brain, and it’s not only in the apple. It’s actually in the relationship between the two. And this is the basis of what I’m saying. So in physics, right, the relational view of quantum mechanics is very similar to what I’m saying, or, you know, an object doesn’t have velocity. It only has velocity in relation to some other object. The velocity isn’t in the object. It’s in the relationship between the two. (Time 0:21:34)
Crítica al reduccionismo implícito en la teoría clásica de las emociones. Transcript: Speaker 1 So I think context is a very unfortunate word, actually, because it implies that there are some signals which are central and then everything else is just context. Right. So the paper wasn’t really about facial expressions. It was just that the science of facial expressions is a good example of the problem that we face in the following way. So again, getting back to the inside out view of emotion. So the idea there is that there’s a set of facial movements that express, that are biologically inherent expressions of a particular emotion category. So you smile when you’re happy, you frown when you’re sad, you scow when you’re angry and so on. And of course, you don’t scow every time you’re angry. You don’t smile every time you’re happy. Sometimes you smile when you’re not happy. But the idea in the inside out view is that context, which means anything other than the inherent emotional meaning that these signals are supposedly have can modify tweak, really Moderate the expression of emotion. And so they’re given secondary, sort of a secondary causal status. So the real cause of your facial movements is some set of emotion signals inside your brain. But then everything else that’s going on could moderate that, could kind of tune it up or tune it down or somehow tweak what’s going on, tweak the expression. And that’s a different, a very different kind of view. It’s a very mechanistic kind of 19th century, actually maybe even 17th century mechanistic view. It’s some people refer back to Descartes, they’ll say, this is a, this is the machine metaphor that Descartes used, right? That everything works like a machine. And so you can take apart the, you can take apart the emotional causes of facial movements and you can separately investigate them from all the other contextual factors, like whether You’re, you know, interacting with someone who is higher in status than you or somebody who’s subordinate to you, those are moderating contextual factors. And you can kind of pull them apart and study them separately. But a very different view of causation is what’s, what’s called complexity, complexity theory, the idea that you’ve got multiple sources of causation, including context, what we Would, you know, in this first mechanistic view, what we would call context, in this other view, we would say, well, everything, all of, all of these other factors are also causal, and Each of them on their own might have a weak impact on the outcome. So who you’re interacting with, what time of day it is, how much you ate earlier, how much sleep you’ve got, all of these things are, are actually equivalently important. They each on their own, if you studied them independently, they might predict the outcome of your facial movements a little bit, maybe 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, if you’re lucky, you know, that Would be your effect size. But when you put them all together, they have these nonlinear interactions. They become, the causal force becomes more than the sum of its parts is the phrase. And it’s sort of like baking bread, you know. If you look at the proportion of salt in bread by the weight of the flour, it’s probably like 1% if that. But God help you if you leave it out, you know, because it won’t taste like bread. And when you, when you have it in there, you don’t even taste the salt. It’s not like you taste, that’s not like bread tastes salty, but you need it for the bread to taste normal. So you, in a recipe, you take all of these causal factors, all these ingredients, you put them together and they produce something that is more than the sum of their parts. And interestingly, in recipes, you don’t usually consider, for example, the amount of hydration in your oven as an ingredient. You don’t consider the temperature of your oven as the ingredient. You don’t consider the amount of yeast in the air where you are as an ingredient. But all of these things actually are also causal features, causal factors in the complex causation that produces a loaf of bread. And so what I was trying to suggest in this paper is that this is also how the brain works because the brain is processing signals from the body and from the world. And also it’s computing its own, it’s generating its own signals, reinstating signals from the past and processing, creating new features out of the signals that it’s taking in from The body and the world. And all of them are important. And in psychology, what most scientists do is they say, well, I’m really interested in the ones that are about vision. So I’m going to say those are the primary ones and everything else is context. But that’s just how brains work when they’re studying other brains. That’s not actually how brains work. Brains are complex. They have complex causation. That’s what I was trying to suggest. (Time 0:25:19)
cerebro complejidad crítica emociones teoría
cerebro complejidad crítica emociones teoría
The Role of Context in Facial Expressions and Emotions in the Brain • The concept of context in relation to facial expressions is problematic. • Facial expressions are biologically inherent expressions of specific emotions. • Context can modify and moderate the expression of emotion. • The primary cause of facial movements is a set of emotion signals in the brain. Transcript: Speaker 1 So I think context is a very unfortunate word, actually, because it implies that there are some signals which are central and then everything else is just context. Right. So the paper wasn’t really about facial expressions. It was just that the science of facial expressions is a good example of the problem that we face in the following way. So again, getting back to the inside out view of emotion. So the idea there is that there’s a set of facial movements that express, that are biologically inherent expressions of a particular emotion category. So you smile when you’re happy, you frown when you’re sad, you scow when you’re angry and so on. And of course, you don’t scow every time you’re angry. You don’t smile every time you’re happy. Sometimes you smile when you’re not happy. But the idea in the inside out view is that context, which means anything other than the inherent emotional meaning that these signals are supposedly have can modify tweak, really Moderate the expression of emotion. And so they’re given secondary, sort of a secondary causal status. So the real cause of your facial movements is some set of emotion signals inside your brain. (Time 0:25:19)
Exploring Causation: Mechanistic versus Complexity Theory • Facial movements can be taken apart and studied separately from other contextual factors. • Complexity theory suggests that multiple sources of causation, including context, can have a weak impact on the outcome. Transcript: Speaker 1 That everything works like a machine. And so you can take apart the, you can take apart the emotional causes of facial movements and you can separately investigate them from all the other contextual factors, like whether You’re, you know, interacting with someone who is higher in status than you or somebody who’s subordinate to you, those are moderating contextual factors. And you can kind of pull them apart and study them separately. But a very different view of causation is what’s, what’s called complexity, complexity theory, the idea that you’ve got multiple sources of causation, including context, what we Would, you know, in this first mechanistic view, what we would call context, in this other view, we would say, well, everything, all of, all of these other factors are also causal, and Each of them on their own might have a weak impact on the outcome. So who you’re interacting with, what time of day it is, how much you (Time 0:27:22)