Intensity: Each emotion can vary in its level of intensity.Īs mentioned earlier, Plutchik’s eight basic emotions are joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, anticipation, anger and disgust. Similarity: All emotions have different degrees of similarity to one another. Opposites: The primary emotions are categorized into pairs of polar opposites. Hypothetical Constructs: Primary emotions are hypothetical constructs or idealized states whose properties and characteristics can only be inferred from various kinds of evidence. Prototype Patterns: Despite different forms of expression of emotions in different species, there are certain common elements, or prototype patterns, that can be identified.īasic Emotions: A relatively small number of prototype, primary emotions, or basic emotions exist and can be identified.Ĭombinations: All other emotions are mixed or derivative states that is, they occur as combinations, mixtures, or compounds of the primary emotions. For example, the emotion of trust results in collaboration and sharing between humans. Survival Issues: Emotions evolved over time in order to increase the chances of survival. Emotions were present in animals before apes evolved. The following are his primary points:Īnimals and Humans: Animals and humans both experience basic emotions in similar ways.Įvolutionary History: Emotions developed as a result of evolution. Plutchik’s theory was also based on several ideas that he developed with regards to how animals and humans experience emotions. At the highest level of intensity, anger becomes rage. For example, the wheel shows anger at its least level of intensity as annoyance. The darker the shade, the more intense the emotion. The intensity of the emotion is also indicated by the hue of each color. The intensity of each emotion decreases as you move outward and increases as you move toward the wheel’s center. These emotions are represented on the illustration above. Surprise → how one feels when something unexpected happens.Anticipation → in the sense of looking forward positively to something which is going to happen.Disgust → feeling something is wrong or nasty.Eight Basic EmotionsĪccording to Plutchik’s Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotions there are eight basic emotions: In response to this event, you might move slowly away from the bear in order to escape (goal-directed behavior). Your fear in turn activates a fight-or-flight response. You would probably think you were in danger (cognition), which would cause you to feel fear (emotion). Emotion plays an important role in terms of survival, and it influences both cognition and behavior.įor example, imagine you were in the woods and you encountered a bear (threatening event). They not only evolve over time, they are adaptive in order to improve various aspects of our lives, such as our happiness and social abilities. Because of this, emotions tend to be far more complex than most people realize.įor each of us, our emotions have a lengthy evolutionary history throughout our lives. While he identified only eight basic emotions, you can see from the wheel that there are different degrees which create a wide spectrum of emotions. Plutchik created the wheel of emotions to illustrate the various relationships among emotions. By definition, an emotion is any relatively brief conscious experience characterized by intense mental activity and a high degree of either pleasure or displeasure. For example, we may describe pain as the state of feeling unhappiness or displeasure. When we think about our emotions, we tend to think of them as related to our feelings. An example of this would be the way in which fear triggers the fight-or-flight response. He believed that each of these emotions had the ability to be the trigger of types of behavior with high survival value. He proposed that these primary emotions are biologically primitive and have evolved over time in order to increase the reproductive fitness of humans. Plutchik suggested that there were eight basic emotions anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy. Robert Plutchik was a psychologist who developed a psychoevolutionary theory of emotion, considered one of the most influential classification approaches for general emotional responses.

Plutchik's wheel of emotions triads