Emotion And Autonomy In The Movie 'Inside Out'

Usually, children have a tendency of gaining well-developed strategies related to emotion and autonomy during their middle childhood (Underwood & Rosen, 2013). In the movie “Inside out”, the heroine Reiley, a 11-year-old girl, had a complicated emotional struggle after she moved to a new city with her family. Fortunately, after a series of unexpected experiences, Reiley was finally able to face her daily-life problems and to enhance corresponding ability of dealing with her mood and emotion. In psychology, this movie could be related to three subjects: emotion regulation, autonomy, and socialization, respectively. In the beginning of this movie, because of Reiley’s father’s job problem, she had to move into a new city with her families. The
In the movie, Riley did not show any sign for her advancement of autonomy. She was trying to follow her parents’ suggestions in order to make them happy and pretend their lives are still in the original pace. Parenting, as a important component of socialization, had given Riley an improper sample to follow(Chen & Rubin, 2011). For instance, every time Riley felt sad and upset, her father would try to make her smile again by making a monkey-look. However, her father’s behavior did have an effect of dealing with Riley’s temporary stress, but deeply inside her mind, the essential concern remained over time. On the other hand, Riley’s father expressed anger towards his daughter’s unusual angry behaviors on the dinner table. Instead of asking Riley what the true reason of getting angry, her father’s inappropriate reaction relatively made developmental framework complicated, which even harder for Riley to practice corresponding emotional adjustment (Chen & Rubin, 2011). Therefore, it is important to ask parents to keep their awareness of interacting with their children, and this would be helpful for children to develop emotion-related behaviors, characteristics,