This table is especially interesting to me because it moves all the way from the stimulus through feeling to behavior and finally the emotional and psychological effect of the overall experience. THE COMPLEX, PROBABILISTIC SEQUENCE OF EVENTS INVOLVED IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN EMOTION Stimulus event Plutchik also related the primary emotions to a sequence of adaptive or defensive behaviors in the following table (from Theories of Emotion by Robert Plutchik and Henry Kellerman. Some of the associations are questionable, but it’s interesting to think about this classification and how emotions are linked and blended. That seems more appropriate word for the action that follows an emotion rather than the emotion itself. Partly, that may result from some of the name choices he makes, such as submission. There’s a lot I don’t agree with in this classification. Hence, anticipation and sadness yield pessimism, surprise and anger yield outrage, fear and disgust produce shame, and so on. The primary emotions can merge in several directions among the subsidiary feelings. An interesting feature of this diagram is the multiple levels of links. These links reveal additional emotions, like shame, dominance, curiosity and despair. The dyad arrangement shows links among primary emotions in a more flexible manner than the wheel. Plutchik also organized emotions as pairs or dyads in the second diagram. So love is linked to joy and trust, contempt to anger and disgust, awe to fear and surprise, and so on. The emotions in the outermost white band are more complex human states of feeling, such as love or remorse, that grow out of the primary states. (I can’t see, though, how boredom is the less intense form of loathing – but there’s lots to quibble about here.) In this diagram, he shows the less intense in the outer circle and the most intense in the center.įor example, the progression of intensity leads from serenity to joy to ecstasy, from annoyance to anger to rage, from acceptance to trust to admiration, etc. Just as colors have different levels of intensity, so do emotions. Plutchik captured the increasing complexity of emotions by comparing them to a color wheel. These are the emotional states shared by many animals in different degrees. The primary emotions are the eight shown in the middle of the three circles of this figure, and he groups them as four pairs of opposites: fear vs. I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychology as it has been applied recently to depression itself, but Plutchik presents the complexity of emotions in an interesting and helpful way. He posited that all animals, including humans, share the “primary” emotions. This image is the work of Robert Plutchik, a psychologist who saw emotions, as Darwin did in his groundbreaking The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, as playing a role in the evolution of animal life. There are many models for capturing the range of human emotion, but one that caught my eye was this highly original classification captured in the wheel of emotions.

Plutchik’s wheel of emotions