Identifying Your Emotions
The Emotion Wheel
The Emotion Wheel, also known as Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, is a tool that helps in identifying, understanding, and articulating feelings.
Developed by psychologist Robert Plutchik in the 1980s, it is designed to depict the complex relationships among emotions.
The wheel is structured in a circle with eight primary emotions positioned as spokes around the wheel: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.
Each primary emotion has an opposite: joy is opposite sadness, trust is opposite disgust, fear is opposite anger, and surprise is opposite anticipation.
Each primary emotion also has a less intense and more intense variant, forming a kind of gradient. For example, the emotion of "anger" could range in intensity from "annoyance" (less intense) to "rage" (more intense).
The wheel also suggests that more nuanced or complex emotions can be combinations of these primary ones. For example, "love" is a combination of joy and trust.
Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions is a useful tool for therapeutic or introspective exercises, helping people identify and express their feelings more clearly, and understanding the nature and complexity of human emotions.
The Mood Meter
The Mood Meter is an evidence-based tool designed to help individuals learn to recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate their emotions. It was developed by researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence as part of the RULER Approach to social and emotional learning.
The Mood Meter consists of a two-dimensional graph, with one axis representing the pleasantness of an emotion (from unpleasant to pleasant), and the other axis representing the energy level of the emotion (from low energy to high energy).
The combination of these two factors results in a four-quadrant model of mood:
Red Quadrant: High energy, low pleasantness. This quadrant is associated with emotions such as anger, frustration, and anxiety.
Blue Quadrant: Low energy, low pleasantness. This quadrant includes emotions like sadness, disappointment, and despair.
Green Quadrant: Low energy, high pleasantness. Emotions in this quadrant include calm, contentment, and relaxation.
Yellow Quadrant: High energy, high pleasantness. This is where feelings such as joy, excitement, and elation fall.
The ultimate goal is to build these skills to a point where we can more effectively navigate our emotional landscape, leading to better decision-making, healthier relationships, and improved mental health.
Using these two tools, track your feelings every day for a week. Can you spot any trends? Unsure of what to do next? Book a call with me to talk about my 1:1 coaching practice!
