Disney’s two Inside Out Movies turn emotions into personalized stars child development.

Inside Out The series focuses on the emotional life of Riley, whom we first meet as a happy kid who loves hockey. During her childhood, Riley’s emotional life is dominated by Joy.. In the first movie, Joy helps Riley successfully overcome obstacles and family moves while also managing other characters: Sadness, Angerand Disgust — to meet him. goals.

Inside Out 2 It begins with the arrival of puberty. With adolescence, we have a new main character. Anxiety.

What is the connection between puberty and anxiety?

Most people associate this word with puberty With obvious physical changes associated with early life puberty—rapid growth, sexual development, pimples and underarm odor. I wrote about physical changes of puberty before and how rapid physical growth can lead to middle school students being overtired, hungry, and cranky. The physical changes of adolescence can also lead to changes in self-consciousness and social relationships that can make early adolescents anxious.

But an often overlooked effect of puberty may be even more important: Cognition.

earnings cognition. Adolescents make five major gains in cognitive development as they move from primary school to secondary school.

• They can think about the possibilities
• They can think about abstract concepts
• Their metacognitive abilities develop (they can think about thinking)
• They can think multidimensionally and highlight one idea over another
• They can think relatively by understanding events from different perspectives.

These changes allow adolescents to improve their skills. executive functioningBe more planned and have more self-control. It also allows them to think in more complex and sophisticated ways. However, all these gains are likely to be realized in the long term. Just as rapidly growing children can become awkward as they adjust to their rapidly growing bodies, children with rapidly developing cognitive abilities can stumble as they learn to use their new skills.

Cognitive Development, Anxiety, and Inside Out 2

The connection between cognition and anxiety is beautifully demonstrated. Inside Out 2. heat FearThe movie points out that this is to protect Riley from being harmed by things outside of herself. Although Fear feels unpleasant and holds Riley back, it is fundamentally protective and encourages Riley to be careful.

Anxiety, another unpleasant feelingIt is also fundamentally protective. But instead of protecting Riley concrete protects him from dangers hypothetical frequently encountered dangers abstract.

Note the importance of cognition here. Fear worries about tangible things you can see and touch, like fire and falling. Anxiety is worrying about: maybe to be. It generates many different potential future scenarios (hypothetical situations). And these things usually include: shame or loss of face, intangible things you can’t see or touch.

Anxiety is the master of the scenario, Suppose? If Riley makes a mistake, it can produce many different things that can go wrong. This is something Riley can do thanks to her newly developed cognitive skills: think about hypothetical, abstract situations.

What Anxiety hasn’t mastered yet (because it’s such a young emotion in the movie) is judgment. Like fear, he sees many potential dangers. This can lock him out so badly that he freezes, unable to take action because there are so many different possibilities that he can’t choose what’s best.

As Riley’s cognitive abilities improve, she will begin to weigh the likelihood of different scenarios occurring. This can be clearly seen when Joy reacts in horror to Anxiety’s harnessing of Riley’s power. imagination.

Joy counters by pointing out the bad things as well as the great things that could happen in the future. More importantly, Joy also introduces multidimensional thinking when looking at some of the negative scenarios that Anxiety imagines. Although they it could be They will, they probably won’t. Can you imagine multiple different potential futures and weigh the relative likelihood of each? This is advanced cognitive thinking.