There are emotions that visit us suddenly, as if we invoke them just by secretly hoping they won’t show up. However, when they do show up, their visit is always nomadic: they stay only long enough to change us. And when they do leave, we, their temporary home, are no longer the same.
The Atlas of Emotions was created by the eminent psychologist Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama, to increase our understanding of how emotions affect what we do and say. 'We don’t always realize that we’ve adopted an emotion until someone points it out to us or until the emotional episode is over,' Ekman says. 'Having a choice about when to experience an emotion and how to experience it requires us to introduce a foreign element at the beginning of the emotion: consciousness. The Atlas of emotions was created to illuminate the path to that.'
In 2014, Dalai Lama asked Ekman to create a map of emotions, hoping that such a map could help people make their experiences more constructive. As a first step, a survey was carried out among 149 scientists (emotion scientists, neuroscientists and psychologists who are published leaders in their fields) to ascertain a consensus about the nature of emotions and the moods or states they produce. Of the researchers, 88% agreed that there are universal emotions — emotions that are common to all people, no matter where they live or how they were raised: anger, fear, disgust, sadness and enjoyment.
The Atlas of Emotions is a fantastic tool for travelling the world of these five emotions, in their many nuances and micro-expressions. Each emotion is called a 'continent' and each has a state, action, detonators and moods until a state of calm is reached in the ocean of the mind — a state necessary to assess and understand these changing emotions. This tool is ideal for all employees engaged in the field of psychosocial work, especially for social workers.