The website is, Atlas of Emotions, and it's not really about inner peace. It's more about the Dalai Lama's notion of emotions as reactive internal events that prevent inner peace, combined with information about the five emotions considered universal by the 149 experts surveyed for this purpose.
The emotions are:
Anger
Fear
Disgust
Sadness
Enjoyment
The site was conceived by the Dalai Lama as a "map of the mind", and developed by Dr. Paul Ekman (for $750,000), who conducted the survey, and has done pioneering work in nonverbal behaviors, especially facial expressions. He now has a company called the Paul Ekman Group, or PEG, which will teach you, for a fee, to read people's expressions and determine if, for example, they are lying. He was a major consultant for Inside Out, the Pixar movie that illustrates the emotional life of a girl named, Riley (I assume based on the expression, "Living the life of Riley," meaning the good life). He was also consultant and inspiration for the main character on the TV series, "Lie to Me", which I know nothing about.
The site is primarily visual, with the imagery designed by a company called, Stamen, that creates data visualizations. It's interesting that the colors used to depict the five emotions on the site:
match the colors of the corresponding characters in Inside Out:
The way the site works is you land on the home page, with those five circles of emotion, which are called, "continents". Remember, this is supposed to be a map. If you click on a continent, you get a brief description. For example, Sadness brings up, "We're saddened by loss."
You also get a menu to the right which lists, Continents, States, Actions, Triggers, Moods, and Calm. If you go to States, after you've clicked on Sadness, you get a graph of various states related to sadness, with overlaps, from least intense to most. The least intense for Sadness is Disappointment, "A feeling that expectations are not being met." The most intense is Anguish, "Intense agitated sadness."
There are left and right arrows to switch to other basic emotions, but also a down arrow, corresponding to the menu on the right, with more about the emotion you're looking at. The next one down is Actions, with another visual including a range of possible actions for each given state. For anguish, you can seek comfort, which is considered a constructive action. You can mourn, which is ambiguous. And you can withdraw, which is destructive.
This is a good illustration of one of the main limitations of the site-that it oversimplifies, but that probably makes it more widely accessible.
The next down is Triggers, which are either universal, like losing a loved one, or learned, like perceiving a loss of status.
And next down is Moods, the "longer lasting cousins" of emotions. For Sadness, the corresponding mood is Dysphoria.
That's as deep as the graphics go. The only thing left is calm, which you access from the right hand menu. It has nothing but a short description:
Experiencing Calm
A calm, balanced frame of mind is necessary to evaluate and understand our changing emotions. Calmness ideally is a baseline state, unlike emotions, which arise when triggered and then recede.
The only other feature of the site is a link to the "Annex", where you can find the scientific basis for the work, some more complicated definitions, the signals of emotional display, and a page of "Psychopathology", which lists various DSM diagnoses related to each emotion.
I wasn't thrilled with this page. For one thing, I disagreed with some of the categorization. For example, as an anxiety disorder, OCD was listed under Fear. But etiologically, at least from an analytic standpoint, OCD is more about a way of dealing with aggression, so I would have listed it under Anger. It also lists Mania under enjoyment, with a qualification about it being pathological enjoyment. But I don't think this is what's actually meant by the term, Enjoyment.
And this page doesn't mention the DSM, even though it includes diagnoses like Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD).
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the Atlas of Emotions. On the one hand, it recognizes that we usually don't know why we feel what we feel, or do what we do, and that's useful to know. To quote the NY Times quoting the Dalai Lama:
“We have, by nature or biologically, this destructive emotion, also constructive emotion,” the Dalai Lama said. “This innerness, people should pay more attention to, from kindergarten level up to university level. This is not just for knowledge, but in order to create a happy human being. Happy family, happy community and, finally, happy humanity.”
On the other hand, the goal is a calm state:
“When we wanted to get to the New World, we needed a map. So make a map of emotions so we can get to a calm state.”
I think this calm state is supposed to be an absence of emotion, either good-feeling or bad-feeling, a Buddhist ideal, so emotion is viewed as the enemy:
“Ultimately, our emotion is the real troublemaker,” he said. “We have to know the nature of that enemy.”
When I read this, I was reminded of the talk I attended, that I wrote about in Laughing Rats, where Jaak Panksepp noted that, "Most learning takes place through affective shifts." So if we contain our emotions, do we prevent ourselves from learning new things?
And in that same talk, Jean Roiphe noted that, "Ego functioning often involves "taming" certain affects, especially through thought and language, but it also involves intensifying some affects, so that people can feel truly alive. A full human life can't be reduced to an all or nothing switch of feeling in response to external events."
Also, I'm not sure "calm" isn't an emotion.
Maybe I just have trouble with this because I'm so steeped in a culture of neurotically exaggerated emotions, so the ideal of inner peace isn't just unattainable, it's laughably unapproachable, which, for me, quickly turns into undesirable.
