A neuroscientist explains why we need better ways to talk about emotions

Pixar’s Inside Out is a charming, creative film — that “provides a good example of many common but incorrect assumptions about emotion.” That’s according to Ralph Adolphs and David Anderson, both professors of neuroscience at Caltech and the authors of The Neuroscience of Emotion (Princeton University Press).Watching the film you’d think, for example, that there are just a few primary emotions, that emotions have mostly external causes, that they’re lik