You can then design your reality to take these triggers into account. This process begins with recognizing the stimuli that create negative emotions. Understanding this journey of your emotions from stimulus to response helps you to improve your awareness of your emotions and regulate your responses. Stimulus → perception → feelings → physiological change → impulse →reaction → behavior.

Plutchik’s theory of the nature of human emotions states that all emotions start with a stimulus and end with a behavior: How to use the wheel to improve your self-awareness: Having an awareness of your emotions will help you to avoid destructive reactions to your emotions and allow you to respond in an empowering way. When an individual is overwhelmed and unsettled by intense emotion they have a visual tool to give them an insight into what is happening. The Emotion Wheel is an excellent tool to improve self-awareness. Using the Emotion Wheel for Self-Awareness Using the wheel we can label the primary emotion, identify potential paths of emotions, (secondary emotions) and learn how to balance negative emotions with the opposite, positive emotion. The wheel offers an insight into the various possible emotions, their combinations and their contrasts. The purpose of the wheel is to offer clarity and guidance during challenging emotional experiences. The categories combine to create secondary emotions in the spaces between while the categories opposite from each other demonstrate contrasting emotions. The categories of emotions relate to each other in two ways. Moving into the center layers you have the primary emotions and at the core of the wheel you have the more intensified versions of the primary emotions. The outer layers show the least intense emotions.

The more intense the emotion, the more intense the shade. The components of the Emotion Wheel: 1.ColorsĮach category of emotion is represented by a different color. The center also displays the most intense experience of our primary emotions. The secondary emotions on the periphery are less intense experiences of these eight emotions or are a combination of two primary emotions. The wheel displays these 8 categories of emotion and claims they are at the root of all feelings. Plutchik’s theory on human emotions states that there are 8 primary emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, anticipation, anger, and disgust. The Emotion Wheel was developed by Robert Plutchik. The tool is used to help individuals identify their emotions and guide them to self-regulate in moments of intense emotional discomfort. The Emotion Wheel is a visual map of the various types of human emotions.

Plutchik's color wheel emotion