Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions: Eight Primary Emotions, Their Opposites and Their Blends

About this tool

Plutchik's wheel of emotions is a model of emotion proposed by the psychologist Robert Plutchik, usually dated to his 1980 book Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis, with earlier versions going back to 1962. It arranges eight primary emotions in a circle, with each emotion sitting opposite the one Plutchik considered its polar opposite, and it shows three intensities of each emotion as concentric rings. Plutchik's claim was that these eight emotions are basic in an evolutionary sense: each one evolved because it drove a behavior that helped animals survive, and every other emotion is a blend or a milder or stronger form of the eight. The wheel is the flat version of a cone he also drew, with height standing for intensity.

The eight primary emotions, reading clockwise, are joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. They form four opposing pairs: joy and sadness, trust and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation. Plutchik argued that the members of a pair cannot be felt at full strength at the same time, in the way that you cannot move toward and away from something at once. Each primary emotion comes in three intensities, mild at the outer ring, primary in the middle, strongest at the center: joy runs from serenity to ecstasy, fear from apprehension to terror, anger from annoyance to rage, sadness from pensiveness to grief, trust from acceptance to admiration, disgust from boredom to loathing, surprise from distraction to amazement, and anticipation from interest to vigilance. The colors deepen toward the center to match.

The most used feature of the wheel is its dyads, the blends formed when two primary emotions occur together. The primary dyads are the eight pairs of neighbors on the wheel. Joy plus trust is love; trust plus fear is submission; fear plus surprise is awe; surprise plus sadness is disapproval; sadness plus disgust is remorse; disgust plus anger is contempt; anger plus anticipation is aggressiveness; and anticipation plus joy is optimism. Plutchik also described secondary dyads, formed by emotions one step apart, and tertiary dyads, two steps apart. This page gives the primary dyads as illustrated in Plutchik's 2001 paper in American Scientist; the longer lists of secondary and tertiary labels found on many charts are not reproduced here. The further apart two emotions sit, the less often they combine and the more conflicted the blend feels.

In Plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory, each primary emotion is a chain: a triggering event, an interpretation of it, a feeling, a behavior, and a function that behavior serves. Fear, in this account, is set off by a threat, is interpreted as danger, is felt as fear, produces escape, and serves protection. Trust produces approach and affiliation; anticipation produces exploration. Plutchik was explicit that emotions are whole sequences that include behavior, and that the subjective label is only one part. It is a useful corrective to the idea that an emotion is only how it feels from inside.

Plutchik's wheel is often confused with a different chart. The Feelings Wheel, published by Gloria Willcox in the Transactional Analysis Journal in 1982, is the one with six core feelings in the middle, mad, sad, scared, joyful, powerful, and peaceful, and two rings of increasingly specific feeling words around them. Willcox's wheel is a vocabulary aid: it helps a person move from a vague word to a precise one, and it does not claim that its six cores are biologically basic or that they come in opposites. Plutchik's wheel is a theory of what emotions are and how they relate. They look similar and serve different jobs. If you want help naming what you feel in the moment, the Feelings Wheel is the easier tool; if you want to understand why love might be joy plus trust, Plutchik's is the one.

The evidence for the model is limited. The wheel is widely taught and used in emotion education, design, and marketing, and it is a coherent, memorable map. It is not a validated measurement instrument, and the specific claims behind it are contested. There is no consensus in emotion science that there are exactly eight basic emotions; Paul Ekman's influential list has six or seven and does not include trust or anticipation, and constructionist researchers such as Lisa Feldman Barrett argue that emotions are built from more basic ingredients rather than being discrete categories at all. The opposite pairs are intuitive but not well tested, and the dyad labels are Plutchik's reasoned proposals rather than findings. Treat the wheel as a useful way of thinking, not as a settled fact about the brain.

The wheel is most useful in three situations. The first is building a richer emotion vocabulary, since seeing annoyance, anger, and rage on the same spoke makes intensity visible and helps a person say I am annoyed rather than I am furious when that is the truth. The second is untangling a mixed feeling: checking whether a feeling you cannot name is disappointment, disapproval, or sadness with a bit of anger gives you a place to start. The third is teaching, where the opposites and blends introduce the idea that emotions have structure. Research linking a larger emotion vocabulary, sometimes called emotional granularity, to better regulation gives this kind of practice some support, even though the wheel itself has not been tested as an intervention.

Common mistakes are mostly about taking the diagram too literally. The dyads are not formulas; love is not reducible to joy plus trust in the way that green is blue plus yellow, and nobody should feel they are doing it wrong if their love includes fear or their grief includes relief. The intensity rings are not a scale with numbers, and the wheel does not tell you what you should feel in a given situation. Nor does the wheel cover everything; loneliness and jealousy have no obvious home and must be squeezed in as blends. And it is not a diagnostic tool.

A reference chart cannot tell you whether what you are feeling is a problem. If intense sadness, fear, or anger is there most days, if you find it hard to name or notice any emotion at all, or if strong feelings are regularly costing you relationships, sleep, or work, a licensed therapist can help with the underlying pattern. Approaches such as emotion-focused therapy, CBT, and DBT all include work on recognizing and labeling emotions, and Psychology.com's directory lets you search for therapists by specialty at no cost.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the eight primary emotions, the opposite pairs, the intensity terms and the primary dyads against Plutchik's published model, and the distinction from the Willcox Feelings Wheel.

References

1. Plutchik R. Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. Harper & Row; 1980.
2. Plutchik R. The nature of emotions. American Scientist. 2001;89(4):344-350.
3. Willcox G. The Feeling Wheel: a tool for expanding awareness of emotions and increasing spontaneity and intimacy. Transactional Analysis Journal. 1982;12(4):274-276.
4. Ekman P. An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion. 1992;6(3-4):169-200.
5. Barrett LF. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2017.

Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions FAQ