Allison Clark
Professor Hoskins
Adolescent Development
7 December 2018
Character Analysis
In the movie Inside Out, eleven-year-old Riley had to deal with the five main
emotions that most of us deal with daily. These emotions are joy, sadness, fear,
disgust, and anger; However, Riley was navigating these emotions while dealing with
the onset of puberty and moving halfway across the country. When the first day in the
headquarters was over, Joy pressed a lever that sent all the new memories that day to
the long-term assembly line. Because long term memory is a system for
permanently storing, managing, and retrieving info for later use, this should have
been a good thing for Riley since most of her long-term memories involved
positive interactions with her family. But Riley was faced with having to adjust to her
new life and this led to an emotional scramble.
Stage 5 of Erikson’s theory deals with identity diffusion which basically
just means that a person is trying to figure out who they are. Riley is facing this
dilemma when her teacher asks her to share something about her life in
Minnesota. Hockey had always been a big part of Riley’s life and none of the students
in her new school could identify with playing the sport. This incident can also be
explained by the child development theory which basically states that social and
emotional maturity are intertwined and as emotional maturity increases,
adolescents become more vulnerable. Because Riley was not able to establish any
close friendships at her new school, she relied on her friendships in Minnesota and
became furious when she found out she had been replaced by a likable girl on the
hockey team. When Joy and Sadness were separated from headquarters, they relied on
Anger, Disgust, and Fear to take control of Riley’s behaviors. Without Joy, Riley was
stressed and that led her to make bad decisions. Because stress is the process by
which we perceive and respond to certain events or “stressors” that we view as
challenging or threatening, Riley began to make some poor choices in her social
interactions and took out her anger on those closest to her.
As Riley was moving between Piaget’s third and fourth stages of cognitive
development, she found that the formal operations stage was more difficult than
