Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions is a psychological model developed by Robert Plutchik to illustrate the relationships among different human emotions. The model proposes eight primary emotions—joy, 📝trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation—organized in opposing pairs. These emotions are arranged in a wheel structure to show how they can combine to form complex emotional states and vary in intensity.
Plutchik conceptualized emotions as evolutionary adaptations that guide survival behavior, with the wheel serving to visualize emotional dynamics such as intensification (e.g., anger to rage) and blending (e.g., anticipation and joy forming optimism). This model has been widely used in fields ranging from psychotherapy to marketing to better understand emotional responses and their influence on decision-making.