There’s a scene in Pixar’s hit film Inside Out 2 when teen Riley, the human protagonist of the Inside Out world, senses that one of her 13-year-old friends isn’t telling her everything. The audience zooms in to Riley’s mind, where her emotions are trying to figure it all out. Disgust is on top of it. She pulls up a screen and starts examining Riley’s friend’s furrowed brow. “Enhance,” Disgust barks, as the view pushes into the telltale corrugator muscle that controls our eyebrows.
That scene, UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner said, is very rooted in science. He would know: he’s been working with Pixar as a scientific advisor on the Inside Out films for over a decade.
“I feel like they are playing a joke on what I’ve been talking to them about for the past 14 years,” he said in this episode of UC Berkeley’s Academic Review video series. “I gave them tutorials on the facial musculature; there are 30 muscles underneath the skin that combine in different ways to express emotion.”