Verified by 
Key points
- Puberty is a time of rapid cognitive growth.
- The positive function of anxiety is to protect us from emotional harm.
- Hypothetical and abstract thinking enhances anxiety by making us better at imagining negative outcomes.
- As cognitive development develops further, we can better weight positive and negative outcomes.
Disney’s two Inside Out films make emotions the personified stars of child development.
The Inside Out series focuses on the emotional life of Riley, who we first meet as a happy hockey-loving child. In childhood, Riley's emotional life is dominated by Joy. In the first film, Joy helps Riley successfully overcome obstacles and family moves as she marshals the other characters—Sadness, Anger, and Disgust—to meet her goals.
Inside Out 2 begins with the arrival of puberty. And with puberty, we have a new main character, Anxiety.
What's the link between puberty and anxiety?
Most people associate the word puberty with the obvious physical changes associated with early adolescence—rapid growth, sexual development, zits, and underarm odor. I've written about the physical changes of puberty before and how rapid physical growth can lead to overtired, hungry, and cranky middle schoolers. The physical changes of puberty can also lead to self-consciousness and changes in social relations that can make early adolescents anxious.
An often overlooked effect of puberty, however, may be even more important: Cognition.
Gains in cognition. Adolescents make five major gains in cognitive development as they move from elementary to middle school.
- They can think about possibilities
- They can think about abstract concepts
- Their metacognitive abilities improve (they can think about thinking)
- They can think multi-dimensionally, playing one idea off of another
- They can think relativistically, understanding things from different points of view.
These changes allow adolescents to improve their executive functioning, be more planful, and have more self-restraint. They also allow them to think in more complex and sophisticated ways. But all of these gains are likely to happen in the long term. Just as kids who grow rapidly can be awkward as they get used to their rapidly growing bodies, kids who have rapidly expanding cognitive abilities can stumble as they learn to use their new skills.
Cognitive Growth, Anxiety, and Inside Out 2
The link between cognition and anxiety is beautifully illustrated in Inside Out 2. The job of Fear, the film points out, is to protect Riley from being hurt by things outside her. Although Fear feels unpleasant and holds Riley back, she is fundamentally protective and urges Riley towards caution.
Anxiety, another unpleasant emotion, is also fundamentally protective. But instead of protecting Riley from concrete dangers, she protects her from hypothetical dangers that are often abstract.
Note the importance of cognition here. Fear worries about things like fire and falling, concrete things you can see and touch. Anxiety worries about things that might happen. She generates many different potential future scenarios (hypothetical situations). And those things often involve embarrassment or loss of face, abstract things you can’t see or touch.
Anxiety is a master of the scenario, What If? She can generate many many different things that can go wrong if Riley makes a mistake. This is something she can do because of Riley’s newly developed cognitive skills: thinking about hypothetical, abstract situations.
What Anxiety has not yet mastered—because she is a very young emotion in the film—is judgment. Like Fear, she sees many potential dangers. This can lock her up so badly that she freezes, unable to act because there are so many different possibilities she can’t choose what is best.
As Riley’s cognitive abilities improve, she will begin to weigh the relative likelihood of different scenarios playing out. This can clearly be seen when Joy reacts in horror to Anxiety’s harnessing of Riley’s imagination.
Joy fights back by pointing out the wonderful things that can happen in the future as well as the bad. Importantly, Joy also introduces multi-dimensional thinking, as when she looks at some of the negative scenarios that Anxiety imagines. Although they could happen, they probably will not. Being able to imagine multiple different potential futures and weigh the relative likelihood of each? That is advanced cognitive thinking.
