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    Plutchik’s wheel of emotions

    普拉切克情绪轮

    Model
    Also called
    Plutchik’s emotion wheel, emotion wheel

    Plutchik’s wheel of emotions comes from American psychologist Robert Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. It proposes a small number of basic emotions, each tied to an adaptive function, and treats all other emotions as mixtures or derivatives of them.[1]

    Select a petal to see its opposite and any blend Plutchik named with a neighbor. The four labels around the edge are such blends.
    Plutchik’s eight basic emotions: neighbors are similar, opposites face each other. Four blends of neighbors that he named are marked around the edge. Point at or tap parts of the figure for details
    Plutchik’s eight basic emotions: neighbors are similar, opposites face each other. Four blends of neighbors that he named are marked around the edge. Save as image (PNG)

    Key points

    • Eight basic emotions form four opposing pairs: joy and sadness, acceptance (trust) and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation.[1]
    • Similar emotions sit next to each other on the circle. Plutchik drew the whole model as a cone whose vertical axis is intensity, so each emotion ranges from mild to strong.[2]
    • Neighboring emotions blend into what Plutchik called primary dyads: joy plus acceptance gives love, and disgust plus anger gives contempt.[2]
    • Each basic emotion sits in an adaptive chain of stimulus, cognition, feeling, behavior and effect, such as threat → “danger” → fear → running away → protection.[1]

    An example

    Lin’s coworker cuts her off in a meeting, and afterward she just feels “annoyed.” Using the wheel, she picks out anger mixed with some disgust, the blend Plutchik called contempt. Seeing that, she decides to raise it with the coworker privately rather than snap back in the group chat.

    Misreadings and limits

    The wheel is often taken as a proven, complete map of emotions. Plutchik himself called the number of primary emotions “a theoretical decision,”[2] and whether emotion categories have fixed natural boundaries is still debated.[3]

    Sources

    1. 1 Plutchik, R. (1980). A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman (Eds.), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion (pp. 3–33). Academic Press. View source
    2. 2 Plutchik, R. (2001). Integration, differentiation, and derivatives of emotion. Evolution and Cognition, 7(2), 114–125. View source
    3. 3 Barrett, L. F. (2006). Are emotions natural kinds?. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(1), 28–58. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00003.x

    Last checked against sources: October 26, 2026