English teachers have film adaptations to engage their students; history and science teachers have documentaries. Practicing psychologists, often have to be extremely creative in engaging kids and building therapeutic alliance since most of the standard aids have the quality of this:

That is until now. Inside Out is a boon bestowed upon the Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (CBT) working with children struggling with emotional regulation. If you have not seen the movie, it is about Riley, an 11-year-old girl and her emotional homunculi. That is, little anthropomorphic representations of emotions that control her mood and actions as she deals with a move from Minneapolis to San Francisco. And depending on which emotional homunculus (joy, anger, disgust, fear and sadness) or combination of homunculi are currently at the control seat, her behavior alters accordingly. Being that the mind is the setting where most of the movie takes place, various brain functions are represented quite ingeniously in a long extended metaphor. For instance, in psychology the exact nature of the relationship between emotions and memories is unclear but it is widely known that it is deep. The movie represents each memory as a glass sphere, each one taking upon the hue of the emotion Riley experiences at the time. The Emotions then work as a team in the attempt to organize the memories but they are for the most part unaware of how long-term storage, retrieval and prioritization of memories work, or how Sadness is able to change the color of a memory simply by touching it.