Riley's Defense Mechanism In The Movie 'Inside Out'

Inside out is a movie about how the main five emotions ( joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust) personified and control the mind of a 11year old girl, Riley. Riley is a very joyful, goofy and positive girl which her mind is mostly domain by the joy emotion. She is very close to her family, has a very good friend and very good at playing hockey as well. When her father suddenly decide to move to San Francisco due to his working issue, Riley started to feel struggle with her emotions. She couldn’t accept that everything is happening so fast but she had to stay happy in order to be the joyful girl she used to be. She started to miss Minnesota so much, and she couldn’t deal with her own feelings instead she show attitude to her parents which causes

At the beginning of the movie when Riley move to San Francisco, she couldn’t accept all those changes at once but Joy decided to stay positive as always because this is who Riley is. Through this scenes, repression one of human’s defense mechanisms can clearly be seen. According to the Freudian’s approach, defense mechanism is when human try to deal with their unwanted desires or thoughts in order to reduce or avoid anxiety. Repression is when we try to push the threatening thoughts out of consciousness, it is not helping to solve problems as we can see it in the movie that the negative thoughts keep on increases until Riley messes up everything with her family, friends, schools and also her hobby. Repression requires a constant expand of energy which is also showed in the movie that Riley get tired with acting happy and she turn aggressive to everything. She started fight with her parents and blame the others for everything that goes wrong which illustrates the other defense mechanism which is displacement. It is when a person channeling impulses to nonthreatening objects but this do not lead to social rewards. Riley put her anger on her parents on the first day of school because she kind of mess up in the school when she cried in front of the whole class which is consider not cool among the teens. She displace her anger and embarrassment towards her parents. Until the end of the movie, Joy had

The Big Five Personality factors are neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness which makes a person who they are. The action of the five emotions controlling Riley’s mind is another way of illustrating the big five personality of a person, joy for extraversion, sadness for neuroticism, anger for agreeableness, disgust for openness and fear for conscientiousness. The roles of the emotions playing are to lead the big five personality of Riley, how they work in the headquarters which is Riley’s mind had show us what a person is Riley. She is an extrovert because she is always joyful, very goofy and she like to stay outdoor with other people. While, sadness couldn’t really much control her negative feelings but Joy is always there to help Riley to stay happy and most of her memories are fill with happiness which means Riley is not a person with high rate in neuroticism. And then, she is much more a person with high scores of agreeableness even though anger did play an important role of the reason why Riley is acting weird during the climax of the movie but according to the beginning of the movie, Riley is a very understanding and trusting girl. Riley is a very imaginative girl which means she is on the high end of openness, throughout the whole journey outside of the headquarters, she even has a imaginative land that’s full of different ridiculous stuffs. The last