“The more you experience in life and come to realize that all human beings share comparable emotions, the greater is your empathic capacity for all mankind, not just those closest to you.” 

(Helen Riess, Director of Empathy Research, Harvard Medical School)

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A human can experience around 3400 distinct emotions. To understand and manage all of them can, without doubt, be very overwhelming. Therefore it helps to develop emotional literacy for the eight basic emotions that are the ground for all other emotions: joy, sadness, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, disgust, and anger. Being able to recognise and label them allows us to figure out how to manage our emotions and to be more precise about what we are actually feeling.

 

The “emotionWheel” provides visual support for that. Emotions that are on opposite sites of the wheel are also opposites of each other: joy and sadness, acceptance and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation. Emotions that are placed next to each other can have similar effects, e.g. fear and surprise. When moving towards the outside of the circle, the emotion becomes less intense. Hence on the inside, where the colours are strongly saturated, the emotions are most intense. The basic emotions can also appear in combination. E.g. when joy and trust are felt together, one experiences love.

 

The “EmotionWheel” can be used to introduce the eight “basic
Emotions” and to support the exercise “emotionalAwareness”.