Humans can experience approximately 34,000 distinct emotions. So, if you want to improve your emotional literacy, the Emotion Wheel is a great tool to use. You can learn how to deal with emotions from it.
Even with more modest estimates, we have to go through 27 types of distinct emotional states. So from Here, you will understand how to recognize basic emotions and improve your capacity to comprehend and work with your feelings.
What is The Emotion Wheel?
The emotion Wheel or Wheel of emotions is a visual representation of fundamental emotions that shows the varying degrees and complexities of various feelings.
Sometimes it is also referred to as the emotional wheel, which is found by Robert Plutchik.
It is a tool that assists people in dealing with different emotions that arise from tough situations.
The emotion wheel outlines eight fundamental emotions: anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust.
Each emotion is color-coded, with darker and lighter hues representing varying degrees of intensity. With fury, Rage is a dark red, anger is a milder red, and irritation is more of a pink tone.
Source: Positivepsychology.com
The primary purpose of the Emotion Wheel Chart is to clarify what is going on in our inner world, focusing on specific details of our emotional state and trying to understand the depth and reason behind those feelings.
History About Emotional Wheel
Robert Plutchik (1927-2006) was a psychiatric psychologist and professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Later in his career, he worked as an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida.
Dr. Plutchik, a globally known specialist on emotion, proposed the visualization of the emotion wheel to show his concepts in “Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis.”
His focus is mainly on the eight primary emotions and their associated manifestations.
After some time, The Junto Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership began a program and discovered that it required different emotions that were not reflected in the conventional model and its many versions.
As a result, the team created a new emotion wheel, with each wedge representing a distinct feeling, as well as more particularly linked emotions, similar to Plutchik’s wheel, but based on a team-developed list of emotions.
Source: The Junto Institute
It is now used by the Institute to stimulate and explain their positive and negative emotions in forums and meetings. As a result, all participants can get benefits and increased self-awareness.
Also Read: The Healing Power of Music in Our Life
Main Components Of Emotion Wheel Chart
Typically, emotion wheels are designed like vibrant flowers. Our fundamental emotions like sadness, anger, disgust, joy, trust, fear, surprise, and Anticipation are the core of the emotion wheel chart.
The descriptions, causes, and reactions to the foundational, primary emotions used in the wheel of emotions are listed below:
1. Sadness
It includes sorrow, dissatisfaction, depression, apathy, hopelessness, loneliness, and lethargy. It will trigger uncomfortable feelings such as crying. In Plutchik’s emotion wheel, the opposite surface is joy.
2. Anger
It encompasses negative mental feelings such as hatred, rage, violence, and discontent. It will cause aggressive behavior such as fighting. Fear is its polar opposite on the emotion wheel.
3. Disgust
Feelings of aversion, revulsion, and a rejection of contact or a desire for contact are all examples of signs of disgust. It can lead you to dislike persons, locations, or things that are not harmful. Even you might hate yourself, too. Its opposite feeling is trust.
4. Joy
It compresses happiness, bliss, victory, celebration, and a profound sense of fulfillment. It’s a behavior that ensures the continuance of repeatedly effective activities. Sadness stands in contrast to joy.
5. Trust
It shows a generalized emotion of hope, safety, and faith. It is the initial phase of psychological development and determines how people interpret the world. The contrasting emotion of trust is disgust.
6. Fear
Frankness, apprehension, nervousness, concern, anxiety, uncertainty, and dread are primal feelings that can appear. In a biological sense, it aids in avoiding risks shown by earlier learning and memory. Its contrasting emotion is anger.
7. Surprise
It can elicit feelings, including amusement, shock, amazement, bewilderment, and speechlessness. It raises curiosity but might also prompt caution to give time for a cognitive assessment. The opposite of it is anticipation.
8. Anticipation
It involves anticipation of an event, excitement, irritation, pleasure, and expectations. The experience of anticipation is linked to awareness of the present and readiness for the future. Its opposite feeling is a surprise.
How To Use Emotion Wheel?
Emotions are difficult to understand. Sometimes, it is also possible that you can feel two emotions at once.
And that time, you can’t understand what you are doing and how to handle the situation !!!
So, To better grasp what’s going on under the surface, psychologist Robert Plutchik built the emotional spectrum into the emotion wheel. It illustrates the eight main emotions that underpin our experiences, reactions, and perceptions.
This wheel can help you to figure out why you feel the way, what your feelings are trying to tell you, and what to do about it.
To start the usage of the emotion wheel, find your core emotion.
As you can see above, emotions are arranged in the 3 layers of color coordinates.
- Outer Portion: You’ll find low-intensity emotions like acceptance, distraction, boredom, and so on here.
- Moving Toward the Middle Portion: Trust, surprise, contempt, and other fundamental feelings get stronger as you walk closer to the middle portion of the wheel.
- Inner circle: The most potent manifestations, like admiration, amazement, and loathing, among other emotions, are found in the center circle.
In short, People may use the emotion wheel as a tool to communicate their feelings, comprehend how they relate to one another, and gauge the strength of each emotion.
With the help of the wheel, people may recognize their emotions, make wise decisions, look for resolution, find closure, and grow in self-awareness and self-compassion.
Psychological Benefits of Using Emotion Wheel / Feelings Wheel
You can use the emotion wheel as a tool for developing self-awareness. Feeling Wheel promotes emotional literacy in two main ways.
1. It makes it simpler to grasp and express your straightforward emotions.
2. It gives you strength for the fight-or-flight response (It is a physiological response that occurs automatically in response to a stressful or frightful experience.)
According to Plutchik, when you feel something, it is triggered by a specific stimulus in the body. And it is directly related to your behavior.
The feelings wheel helps you to visualize the different types of emotions. To understand the emotional range, the emotional wheels increase self-expression and self-compassion.
It can help you to quit overthinking ability and provides a solution to all the problems. It makes your communication skill better and more effective.
From the emotion wheel chart, you can identify your negative feeling, which helps you to recognize the emotional intensity, i.e., anger, stress, and sadness.
The wheel of emotion has psychological benefits, too. It promotes emotional maturity and decreases impulsivity and harmful behavior by assisting individuals in better understanding, managing, and communicating their emotions.
Conclusion
The Emotion Wheel is a helpful tool as you move toward becoming more transparent, open-minded, curious, and self-aware. By using it, You will experience greater mental clarity and self-confidence.
If you understand your feeling, you can quickly improve your communication, makes your mood, and maintain healthy relationships in your life.
We hope this information helped know how the Emotion Wheel can help you to manage your stress and negative thoughts.
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Disclaimer
The information provided here is just for education purposes only. Kindly consult your physician before making any medical changes.
