How are you feeling?
Introducing the emotional response wheel, our latest EQ tool. Download your high resolution copy for free:
The goal of the emotional response wheel: to shift from reacting to our emotions to responding to them.
By taking a moment to label how we’re feeling, and exploring the underlying reasons, it makes it easier, with intention, to respond the way we want to instead of reacting, well, emotionally.
That process may take a minute, or only a few seconds. The pause, even for a moment, is worth it, as we aim to show up as the type of leaders, partners, parents, and people we want to be.
How to use the tool
STEP ONE
Label
Label what you're feeling in the moment, by choosing a word on the wheel or something similar.
STEP TWO
Explore
Explore the emotions around it, particularly closer to the core. How else are you feeling?
STEP THREE
Describe
Move from the core outward. Describe how you're really feeling, and why.
STEP FOUR
Respond
Now, how do you want to respond? Taking even a moment is worth it.
The Design
Background:
This wheel was developed by Brent Lamphier as a tool within the self-regulation/intention pillar in the EQmethod program.
How he set about designing the wheel is below. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a start. If you find yourself labeling your feelings differently, then by all means, edit and change as you see fit. If you find other tools linked in the research below to better fit your needs, use them!
From Brent:
What exactly is an emotion? A feeling? A physical response to a stimulus? A physiological response to an event? A physical arousal and a cognitive label?
How many emotions are there? 4? 7? 27? 34,000?
What are emotions for?
As we work to better understand ourselves and each other, many scientists and researchers are working to better understand the human brain, how we tick, and why we do what we do.
While we patiently wait for ‘the answer,’ I set out on a parallel path…to better understand how we can use our emotions. What can they teach us, or unlock in us? Even moreso, how do we activate the logical part of our brain when our emotions are running high? How might we help others do the same?
Particularly in the heat of the moment, whether in conversation, or more likely, when we get an email, or a message or a piece of bad news that fires up our amgydala and sends us on an emotional spiral where we’re likely to make it worse.
Or maybe that’s just me.
I certainly built this for me, and I hope it’s useful for you:
The Emotional Response Wheel
The wheel concept was first introduced to me through the work of psychotherapist Dr. Gloria Wilcox, who developed her Feelings Wheel in order to help her clients better recognize and communicate about their feelings.
Her work was inspired by a number of researchers, including a psychology professor Dr. David Plutchick, whose model of emotion creates a cone of 8 basic emotions, and compares them to colors, some being primary and others being secondary (mixtures). There’s a great writeup on using his funnel here.
Many (including me) have built on these concepts from these pioneering thinkers. Some focus more on children, or comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, or simply their own interpretations of the research.
And, of course, there’s a billion dollar Pixar movie built around the idea of core emotions.
I personally found that nearly all of these models seem to have Joy, Sadness, and Fear/Anger as part of their core. I then stumbled upon this study from researchers in both the United States and China, putting forward that those emotions were the foundations of all emotions thanks to neurotransmitters.
This matches much of the research I’ve reviewed in our self-regulation/intention pillar of the EQmethod program, and is, I believe, a very useful way to consider the core of our feelings.
Our body creates (or withholds) these neurotransmitters in response to an event, and we then label that feeling as Joy, Sadness, or Fear/Anger. Why Fear and Anger together? Well, it makes sense to me that fight (anger) or flight (fear) come from a similar place. As the old saying goes...anger is simply fear in disguise.
Remember, if you find a different theory around core emotions useful, or want to start from a different place from where the research took me…do it!
It also makes sense that our core emotions can ‘combine’ to create additional emotions. Gu et al. agreed with this, expanding our ‘core’ to include Disgust, Surprise, and Calm. They used slightly different words, but I built upon the work of those above, including Paul Ekman's work on unique facial representation across cultures, to bring more consensus to the ‘core.’
I rounded out this second layer with other primary emotions that are well-represented in nearly all of the research, and fit in our framework of possibly being ‘combinations’ of core emotions. Some researchers (including Shaver et al.) calls these 'secondary' emotions (between primary and tertiary), and include a sense of safety, love, excitement, anxiety, envy, shame, disappointment, self-hostility, and loneliness.
You may be wondering at this point why I’m using nouns instead of adjectives. Why use ‘sadness’ instead of ‘sad’ or ‘loneliness’ instead of ‘lonley?’
For our purposes, saying ‘I’m feeling a sense of loneliness’ seems to trigger something different in your brain than saying ‘I’m lonely.’ Do you feel the difference?
Exploring emotions as nouns considers them separate from ourselves. Loneliness does not describe us, it’s simply a thing, a feeling, for us to explore.
That takes us to our third layer, what some would call more ‘complex’ emotions. This layer could have 33,984 more emotions, Dr. Wilcox even added blank spaces to later feelings wheels in order to encourage her patients to come up with their own labels. Feel free to use your favorite .pdf editor and make ours your own!
I rounded out this third layer with the additional emotions found by researchers at the University of California Berkeley, who found 27 unique emotions. They are (with a few tweaks) all represented here.
We add: feeling a sense of strength, trust, adoration, desire, interest, anticipation, wonder, shock, worry, confusion, jealousy, resentment, guilt, craving, horror, contempt, frustration, boredom, insecurity, neglection, shyness, awkwardness, nostalgia, and appreciation.
Once again, focusing on the nouns, the labels and the feelings they describe, rather than making it a personal label that describes us. Emotions are fleeting, and I find power in exploring them as such.
Now that we have our wheel, we can use it in the moment (or even simply reflect on the core emotion of the more complex emotion that we’re feeling).
Feel it. Label It. Pause and Explore. Respond.