Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions is a psychological model developed by Robert Plutchik to map the relationships among human emotions, proposing eight primary emotions — 📝joy, 📝trust, 📝fear, 📝surprise, 📝sadness, 📝disgust, 📝anger, and 📝anticipation — arranged as four opposing pairs.
Plutchik conceived emotions as evolutionary adaptations that guide survival behavior, and designed the wheel to visualize two dynamics in particular: intensity, where an emotion strengthens or softens (anger intensifying to rage, or easing to annoyance), and blending, where adjacent emotions combine into complex states (anticipation and joy forming optimism, joy and trust forming love). The circular arrangement places opposite emotions across from one another and similar emotions adjacent, so the structure itself encodes how feelings relate.
The model has been applied across fields from psychotherapy to marketing to interpret emotional responses and their influence on behavior and decision-making, and is frequently reproduced as 📝a flattened, listed version of the wheel for quick reference. Its enduring appeal is less empirical precision than visual clarity: it gives a shared vocabulary for naming and locating emotions relative to one another.