🌈 Understanding Emotional Behavior Through Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

 Emotions can be complicated things. Sometimes they feel like a wave — powerful, unexpected, and hard to handle. The truth is that all of us, from children to adults, experience emotions every single day. We feel happy, sad, scared, angry, or surprised. But have you ever wondered why we feel these emotions, or what purpose they serve? That’s exactly what the psychologist Robert Plutchik wanted to understand.

🧩 What Is Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions?

Dr. Robert Plutchik (1927–2006) was an American psychologist who spent his career studying emotions and their role in human and animal behavior. In 1980, he created a colourful diagram called the Wheel of Emotions. This wheel shows that emotions are connected, like colours on a rainbow. Each feeling can blend with another, grow stronger, or fade away — just like shades of paint mixing (Plutchik, 1980).

At the centre of his model are eight primary emotions — the basic “building blocks” of all emotional life:

• Joy 😊
• Sadness 😢
• Trust 🤝
• Disgust 😖
• Fear 😨
• Anger 😡
• Surprise 😲
• Anticipation 🤔

Each of these emotions has an opposite, forming a kind of emotional balance:

Emotion	Opposite Emotion	Example of How It Feels
Joy	Sadness	Feeling happy about a friend’s success vs. feeling down when you miss them
Fear	Anger	Hiding from danger vs. standing up to it
Anticipation	Surprise	Waiting eagerly vs. being caught off guard
Disgust	Trust	Rejecting something harmful vs. opening to something safe

Plutchik explained that every emotion has a purpose — it helps us survive and adapt (Plutchik, 2001). For example:

• Fear helps us stay safe when there’s danger nearby.
• Anger gives us energy to solve problems or protect ourselves.
• Joy motivates us to repeat experiences that help us grow and connect with others.

So, emotions aren’t “good” or “bad.” They’re messages from our inner world, trying to guide us through life (Freedman, 2023).

🔍 How Emotions Work: From Stimulus to Behaviour

When something happens — what scientists call an event-stimulus — our brain quickly evaluates it. This process is known as cognition or thinking. Then, based on our interpretation, an emotion is triggered, which leads to behaviour.

Let’s look at an example:

1. Event-Stimulus: You see your best friend laughing with someone else.
2. Cognition (Thought): “Maybe they don’t want to play with me anymore.”
3. Emotion: You feel sad or jealous.
4. Behaviour: You might walk away quietly or ask them if everything’s okay.

This sequence shows how tightly our thoughts, feelings, and actions are connected. Understanding that chain is the first step toward emotional intelligence — being aware of what you feel and why.

🎨 The Layers and Intensity of Feelings

Plutchik’s Wheel also shows that emotions have different levels of intensity. Think of it like turning up or down the volume on a song:

• Mild anger might be annoyance.
• Strong anger turns into rage.
• A soft sadness might be disappointment.
• Deep sadness becomes grief.

If we don’t notice or name our emotions early, they can grow stronger and harder to manage. That’s why naming emotions is such a powerful tool — it gives us control instead of letting the feeling control us (Kircanski et al., 2012).

💬 Emotional Combinations and Complexity

Just like colours mix to create new shades, emotions combine too. For instance:

• Joy + Trust = Love ❤️
• Anticipation + Joy = Optimism 🌅

These combinations remind us that feelings are rarely simple — sometimes we’re excited and scared, happy and sad. And that’s okay. It’s part of being human.

🌱 Why Emotional Literacy Matters

Emotional literacy means being able to recognize, understand, and express what we feel. People who can describe their emotions clearly tend to handle stress better and make kinder choices (Salovey & Mayer, 1990).

Here’s how you can practice:

1. Pause and notice what you’re feeling.
2. Ask yourself: “What am I feeling right now? And what else?”
3. Name it — use Plutchik’s Wheel to find the word.
4. Listen to the message: What is this emotion trying to tell me?

When we understand our emotions, we stop fearing them. Instead, we can use them as tools — to protect, connect, and grow.

🔬 The Science and the Heart

Plutchik believed emotions are not random — they are evolutionary tools. They’ve helped humans (and animals) survive for thousands of years.

• Fear warns us to avoid danger.
• Anger pushes us to act when something’s unfair.
• Joy encourages us to connect and build communities.

As Joshua Freedman, CEO of Six Seconds, explains: “Plutchik’s model helps us name and understand emotions, and the Six Seconds Model helps us use that knowledge to take wise action” (Six Seconds, 2023).

So, next time you feel something big inside, take a deep breath and remember emotions are teachers, not enemies. Understanding them — through tools like Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions — helps you become more aware, kind, and resilient.

📚 References

Freedman, J. (2023). Practicing EQ: Emotional Intelligence in Action. Six Seconds Press.

Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086–1091.

Plutchik, R. (1980). Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. Harper & Row.

Plutchik, R. (2001). The nature of emotions: Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice. American Scientist, 89(4), 344–350.

Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.