How are you feeling?
Probably the most famous line associated with therapy, and a question that can be difficult to answer. That’s where the feeling wheel comes in.
Feeling wheels provide a starting point for identifying emotions by providing a list of basic feelings or sensations. We can use this to further explore our emotional patterns. Being able to identify and describe an emotional pattern is an important step in learning how to respond to our emotions in healthier ways.
The most common feeling wheels feature the following core umbrella of emotions: Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Enjoyment, Fear, Sadness, and Surprise. Feeling wheels then list other emotions or sensations that might occur alongside them.
Types of Feeling Wheels
Sensory Feeling Wheels
Some feeling wheels will include sensations we might experience as part of each emotion. For example, sweaty palms and a racing heart might indicate anxiety, fear, or excitement. This type of feeling wheel helps us narrow down what we’re feeling, and connect our physical experiences to our emotional ones.
Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Feeling Wheels
This type of wheel shows connected circles featuring primary emotions and their related secondary and tertiary emotions.
primary emotions are the first emotion we experience when responding or reacting to our environment.
Secondary emotions are responses or reactions to a feeling or an emotion.
Let’s say you invite a friend to spend time with you, but they cancel. You might feel sadness, and then you may feel embarrassed or ashamed that you feel sad. In this case, sadness would be the primary emotion, and shame would be the secondary emotion.
Tertiary emotions are a response to our secondary emotions.
In feeling embarrassed about being sad that your friend canceled, the emotion might be so uncomfortable that you then feel anger or resentment toward the friend for canceling. See the connection? This information can provide clarity and specificity when exploring emotional patterns.
Interested in learning more? Check out the theories most utilized to make feeling wheels: theory of basic emotional development and universal emotions, emotional theory of social psychology, and constructed emotion theory (Coppini et al, 2023). Let us know what YOU think!
Sources:
Coppini, S., Lucifora, C., Vicario, C. M., & Gangemi, A. (2023). Experiments on real-life emotions challenge Ekman’s model. Scientific reports, 13(1), 9511. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36201-5
Ekman, P. (1999). Basic emotions. In T. Dalgleish & M. J. Power (Eds.), Handbook of cognition and emotion (pp. 45–60). John Wiley & Sons Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/0470013494.ch3
