Naming Emotions and Feelings

In my journey to more effectively manage stress and difficult emotions, I was shown an amazing wheel of words that listed many different names of emotions and feelings. This helped to more accurately express what I was feeling at the time and helped me communicate better with others which also helped boost my mood and increase my sense of connection. There are many sites with this type of diagram. I’m going to share 2 of them here that you can look at and we’ve created our own version that you can download and print. You can find it at the bottom of this post.
American Psychologist Robert Plutchik first developed the idea of a feeling wheel in 1980. His version was called ‘The wheel Of Emotions’ or ‘The Emotions Circle’. It presented eight primary emotions (joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise and anticipation), which Plutchik believed were the foundations of all others. A similar version came from Dr Gloria Wilcox in her book “Feelings: Converting Negatives into Positives”. The other wheel I will show here comes from Pastor Geoffrey Roberts and is expanded to include more emotions.
Our wheel has been created by looking at multiple versions and adjusting for what we’ve seen applicable in the last few years and includes over 100 emotions/feelings in english.

I also, just recently found an awesome resource for helping to name emotions and start understanding how emotional triggers affect them and our actions. It’s called the Atlas of Emotions and was inspired by the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama imagined “a map of our emotions to develop a calm mind.” He asked his longtime friend and renowned emotion scientist Dr. Paul Ekman to realize his idea. Ekman took on the creation of the Atlas alongside his daughter, Eve Ekman, a second-generation emotion researcher and trainer. The Atlas represents what researchers have learned from the psychological study of emotion.

Check it out here. http://atlasofemotions.org/

Here is the pdf version I created for you to print out and use to help you in naming emotions and feelings which can help you or your kiddos develop emotional intelligence by naming what you’re feeling.