Plutchik Basic Emotions Circle

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I would like to see a diagram with an explanation of the ordinal dyads and their derivative emotions.

-- Regina de Coeli (reginadecoeli@yahoo.com), June 07, 2004

Answers

Hi Regina, You will probably want to check Plutchik's Emotion: A psychoevolutionary synthesis (1980). To visualize Plutchik's basic emotions circle you could imagine a pie divided into eight equal parts. Starting at "12:00" and going in clockwise order are acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation, and joy. Notice that opposite pieces of pie represent "opposite" emotions. He also has a three-dimensional half sphere version (flat side up), that include terms for stronger intensities of the eight basic emotions at the top and terms for weaker intensities going down toward the bottom. He also theorizes that a particular basic emotion can be mixed with another basic emotion (dyads). Primary, secondary, and tertiary dyads are defined in terms of how close the basic emotions are to each other on the circle. He gives commonly used names for the various dyads. I do not think Plutchik's psychoevolutionary synthesis is the last work on emotions, but at least he deals with many of the complexites and nuances of emotion. I think his emphasizing an evolutionary aspect to his theory is useful. However, there is much we still do not know about human emotions like the following: how many emotions are there, exactly how do we classify all our various emotions, are there families of related emotions, exactly how do emotions interact with each other, and how do emotions interact with other types of mental processes (e.g., cognition and motivation). The field of Emotion is an interesting and important area. I would also add that emotions may be more important to "rational" adaptive activities than was once thought. I hope this helps. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (pkleinginna@georgiasouthern.edu), June 08, 2004.

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