Mark Abayon

In the movie “Inside out” Riley has a lot of biological factors impacting her happiness. Her

serotonin ​levels would be high when she thinks of good memories like, dad and her playing

hockey. On the other hand it could be very low because Riley had a hard time coping with her

move. Different regions of the brain were activated when Riley was feeling sad, angry, or happy

and other emotions they named things like hockey or goofball island. Riley’s ​sleep ​impacts her

behavior a lot because in the movie whenever she had a nightmare you can see from her

expression and how bad her sleep was from the next morning. Exact opposite when she has a

good night.

There’s many psychological factors impacting Riley’s mental health. She has five ​emotions

guiding her. Every emotion is very specific Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. Riley’s core

memories impact her ​personality ​because those are her most important memories. They can

either be good or bad memories and could impact who she is years later. I believe Riley’s

mental health​ might change very fast because she seems to believe she is just sad and then

joy gets lost and she becomes depressed. Riley’s ​screen time​ is making her moody and

irritated. Some things helping Riley’s happiness are her ​parents​. They try to be understanding. I

think something that could’ve helped Riley was Joy wasn’t letting her other emotions be used

she was alway being too controlling. Which leads Riley to always try to hide her emotions and

eventually fall depressed right out of nowhere.

Riley has a lot of Social factors affecting her at the moment. An example of this is her

having a hard time moving. She loved where she used to live and leaving that behind and

starting fresh seems to affect her behaviors a lot. Now she has nobody she knows other than

her parents. Friendship issues can bring up a lot of emotions for kids this age. Something

helping Riley’s happiness is her sadness emotion she let sadness take over and stop hiding her
true emotion letting talk to her parents. Something she could do to help her is be more open and

let people help her.

This film has accurately covered concepts positive psychology has taught me. Inside out

would do an amazing job capturing the entire class's attention because of how relatable it is.

People of all ages could relate to this because we all have emotions and our own problems we

deal with everyday. I think psychology professors could use this concept to help explain mental

health to students. This is probably the easiest and simplest way to make students understand

how serious mental health is.