Emotion Wheel
A handout introducing the idea that emotions come in families, with core emotions at the centre and more specific words around the edge. Helps clients of all ages move from 'bad' or 'fine' to a precise name for what they are feeling.
About this resource
Many clients arrive with a small emotional vocabulary. They describe themselves as stressed, upset, fine or bad, and the lack of precision matters: research on emotional granularity shows that people who can distinguish between, say, disappointment, embarrassment and loneliness regulate those feelings better than people who lump them together as 'feeling bad'. Naming an emotion accurately also reduces its intensity, an effect seen in affect labelling studies.
This handout presents emotions as a wheel with a small number of core families at the centre (such as anger, sadness, fear, joy, disgust and surprise) and progressively more specific words toward the outside. It explains why precision helps, walks through each family with its variations, and invites the client to locate their current feeling. Because it is text-based rather than a diagram, it can be read aloud, used in telehealth, or adapted for clients with visual difficulties.
It is written to work across ages: the language is plain enough for older children, and direct enough for adolescents and adults. It pairs with the Naming Emotions worksheet for younger clients and with DBT emotion regulation skills, where identifying the emotion is the first step before deciding whether to act on it or change it. The professional version adds a list of additional emotion words by family and notes on clients who confuse thoughts ('I feel like he doesn't care') with emotions.
How to use it
- Introduce the wheel when a client is describing feelings in vague terms, or at the start of any emotion regulation work.
- Ask the client to find the family that best fits what they felt in a recent situation, then move outward to a more specific word. Ask what the more specific word tells them that the general word did not.
- Point out that several emotions can be present at once, sometimes from different families. Mixed feelings are normal and the wheel helps separate them.
- With children, read the families together and ask them to point to or say the word that fits a story you tell. Keep it playful.
- Encourage the client to keep the handout visible and to use it when completing diary cards, thought records or feelings check-ins.
References
- Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
- Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.
- Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10-16.
- Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
