Inside Out Movie Psychology

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In the movie Inside Out, there are multiple examples of things one can study or studies in psychology. The first thing that can be noticed that the movie shows is personality. It can also be noticed that it shows a lot of things dealing with memory, both short and long term. Another thing that can be noticed from the movie was it showed a lot about dreams and talked about the different kinds of sleep. There were also more psychology things shown throughout the movie like the parts of the brain, levels of consciousness, and abstract thinking. At the beginning of the movie it shows it shows the core memories in Riley’s brain. These core memories each power a different aspect of Riley’s personality, and make Riley who she is, these memories are …show more content…

The first time it showed Riley sleeping Joy said Riley was in REM sleep, and Riley began to have a dream (Rivera & Stanton, 2015). REM sleep is a stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements, a high level of brain activity, a deep relaxation of the muscles, and dreaming, which is why you dream when you enter REM sleep (Kasschau & McTighe, 2014, p. 181). When Riley is falling asleep for the second time, her train of thought stops working for the day and she begins to dream about the memories that she had from that day at school, but it was a little different than what had actually happened. Most dreams do incorporate fragments of experiences from our lives, and can sometimes even replay a whole memory while you sleep (Lewis, 2014). Joy and Sadness need to wake Riley up to get the train of thought to go again, so Joy tries to wake her up by exciting her, but Joy and Sadness both end up having to try to scare Riley awake (Rivera & Stanton, 2015). When trying to scare Riley awake they have to visit Riley’s subconscious, where her deepest fears are stored to finish scaring her awake. Bringing out one of these fears from Riley’s subconscious caused her to have a nightmare, which can occur during REM sleep, and often frightens the dreaming sleeper awake (Kasschau & McTighe. 2014, p.