| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| Ekman, basic emotions | 6 — universal facial expressions |
| Plutchik's wheel | 8 in opposing pairs, with intensities |
| Geneva Emotion Wheel 3.0 | 20 families, by valence and control |
| Cowen & Keltner, PNAS 2017 | 27 categories, bridged by gradients |
| Circumplex model | No list. Two axes: valence and arousal |
The six, and why they are still everywhere
Paul Ekman's set — anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise — came from cross-cultural work on facial expressions, and it is everywhere because it is small enough to teach and because faces are easy to test.
Its limit is exactly its origin. It is a list of emotions that show on a face, which is a narrower thing than a list of emotions. Boredom, guilt, relief and awe are not on it, and most people spend more of the week in those than in disgust.
Plutchik's wheel: eight, in pairs, at three intensities
Robert Plutchik arranged eight primaries in opposing pairs — joy and sadness, trust and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation — and gave each three intensities, so annoyance, anger and rage are one family at different volumes.
The good idea in it is the intensity axis, which most lists lack and which is often the only distinction that matters: irritation and fury suggest different afternoons.
The weak part is the pairing. The claim that emotions come in opposites is tidier than the evidence supports, and combining two primaries to get a third ("joy + trust = love") is a diagram, not a finding.
The Geneva Emotion Wheel: 20 families, and control
This is the one built for measurement rather than for teaching. The University of Geneva's wheel, now at version 3.0, places 20 emotion families around two axes: valence, and control or power.
That second axis is what makes it worth knowing. Anger and fear are both unpleasant and both activated, so a valence-and-arousal chart puts them in the same corner. They differ in control, and that is precisely the difference that decides what helps: anger comes with a sense of power, fear with a sense of losing it.
It also builds in what most lists refuse to: the wheel lets a person say none and other, because real states do not always land on a spoke.
Cowen and Keltner: 27, and no borders
The most recent large result. Participants rated thousands of short videos, and the analysis in PNAS reported 27 distinct categories — including admiration, awe, awkwardness, boredom, confusion, craving, nostalgia, relief and satisfaction, none of which appear in the classic six.
The finding that matters more than the number: the categories are bridged by continuous gradients, not separated by boundaries. Anxiety shades into fear without a line where one stops. Which means a list is always a simplification, and the useful question is not "which box" but "which region, and how strongly".
The model that refuses to make a list
Posner, Russell and Peterson's circumplex describes emotion as a space with two axes, valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (calm to activated). Every state is a point in the space; no state is a box.
Practically it is the most useful frame on a day when nothing fits. "Unpleasant and activated" and "unpleasant and flat" are two very different afternoons that both get called "bad", and they need opposite things: the first needs calming down quickly, the second does not.
So which list should you use?
Not the biggest one. The one you can actually run through in a few seconds, extended by search when nothing fits.
That is the honest design constraint, and it applies to mood tracking as much as to an app: a list of a hundred words is a reading task, and reading tasks get skipped on exactly the days you needed the exercise. The reason for using a longer list at all is precision, which is the thing that naming your emotions actually predicts benefit for — so the answer is a short list you can leave when you need to, not a long one you have to face every time.
How oléyoga counts them
Five states first, from very bad to very good, then fourteen words at a time inside the state you picked, with search for everything else. The fourteen re-rank on what you have chosen before, so the vocabulary narrows towards yours instead of staying generic.
Under the labels sit more than forty emotion families, and the taxonomy is not house style: the code names its sources, and they are the ones in this article. Scherer for the valence-and-control structure, the Geneva Emotion Wheel for working in families rather than loose words, Cowen and Keltner for the fact that six is not enough, and the circumplex for why the neutral state has to exist at all.
The neutral state is the part most trackers skip, and it is where a lot of real days sit: interest, surprise, uncertainty, boredom, disconnection. A scale that only offers good and bad forces a lie on those days.
Quick questions
What are the six basic emotions?
Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, from Ekman's work on facial expressions. Useful and incomplete, for the reason above.
Is love an emotion?
Depending on the list. It is not in Ekman's six; it is in Cowen and Keltner's 27 and in the Geneva families. Most researchers treat it as more durable than an emotion and closer to a bond.
What is the difference between an emotion, a feeling and a mood?
Roughly: an emotion is brief and has a cause, a feeling is the conscious experience of it, and a mood is longer, more diffuse and often has no identifiable trigger. The lists here are lists of emotions.
How many emotions can a person feel at once?
More than one, routinely. Mixed states are ordinary rather than confused, and every list above has been criticised for handling them badly.
Does knowing more emotion words help?
That is the claim behind emotional granularity, and the evidence for it is reasonable. How to name what you are feeling covers what has been measured.
oléyoga shows fourteen and keeps the rest a search away, which is the compromise a list this size actually needs.
