The Emotion Wheel: What It Is and How to Use It

 We, humans, are the box of mystery and this box one of the most artistic creations of GOD is our emotions. We are blessed with more than 34,000 emotions that drive our personal and professional lives throughout the day, weeks, and years. Amid so many emotions it turns a tough job to control them without being lost. We daily navigate through the eight primary emotions; joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation. 

Can we control emotions?

For an obvious answer, it will be NO, but for a researched-based analysis, the answer is Yes, is possible with the emotion wheel.

 

What is an emotion wheel?

Emotions are the inner changes we all experience based on the response to the evaluation of an external or internal situation. Emotions exist in every individual, but the intensity and expression of these emotions differ from one person to another. It can be due to gender, culture, and race, that influence why people may feel emotions differently.

The emotion wheel is a platform that describes eight basic emotions: anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust. It can be used by the people to identify their emotions and learn how to control, become self-compassionate, and explore how they are feeling.

This wheel was created by Robert Plutchik, to visually represent the primary emotions, display the different degrees and complexities of different  feelings. 

 

How does the emotion wheel work? 

In this wheel, each emotion is color-coded, having different degrees represented by darker and lighter colors, like in anger emotion, rage is dark red, while anger is a lighter shade of red and annoyance is more of a pink tone. 

There is a concept of eight core emotions used to make this wheel. The entire wheel is based on humans’ primary emotions that can be categorized such as anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust. Plutchik has placed the emotions in opposite pairs on the wheel:

• sadness and joy
• anger and fear
• expectation and surprise
• acceptance and disgust

 

As per his belief and theory, these basic emotions further get intensified and can turn milder or get combined with other emotions to share our emotional state. If you think about how to use this wheel, then there is no right or wrong way to use this wheel, you only need to take care of a few tips.

• Find your core emotion
• Identify the cause
• Connect the dots
• Take action

 

Conclusion

At MARco, we hope you enjoyed reading this article, and will help you to explore how to manifest hose sentiments, and promote self-awareness and understand with the feeling wheel app.

To get more mental health updates keep watching with this space. And don’t forget to use the emotion wheel app to control and become self-aware.