Learn · Junto Emotion Wheel

What is an emotion wheel?

A complete answer in 2,000 words — what an emotion wheel actually is, how The Junto Institute built theirs after finding existing wheels incomplete, and how to use one in the moment you can't find a word for what you're feeling.

An emotion wheel is a circular diagram of named human emotions, with a small number of core feelings — in The Junto Emotion Wheel: joy, love, sadness, fear, anger and surprise — branching outward into more specific secondary and tertiary feelings. The wheel exists because self-awareness, the starting point of emotional intelligence, depends on the ability to label what you feel. The Junto Institute developed its own wheel of 100+ feelings after finding existing wheels too negative-skewed and incomplete; it is offered freely as a daily-practice tool.

A short, exact definition

An emotion wheel is a circular diagram of named human emotions. A small number of core emotions sit in the centre or inner ring; each one branches outward into more specific related feelings. The wheel's job is simple: give you, in one glance, more language for what you feel than you usually reach for on your own.

The Junto Emotion Wheel is one such tool, developed by The Junto Institute as part of its work on emotional intelligence. It organises 100+ named feelings around six core emotions — joy, love, sadness, fear, anger and surprise — and is offered freely as a daily-practice companion to the Institute's coaching work.

The terms emotion wheel and feelings wheel are used interchangeably. We use emotion wheel throughout this guide.

Why naming what you feel is the starting point

The Junto Institute describes self-awareness as the starting point of emotional intelligence — the ability to recognise our own emotions and mood, and our thoughts about them, and to see how those thoughts and feelings are connected with our behaviour: how they affect, and are affected by, our actions, reactions, decisions and daily interactions with others.¹

None of that can occur unless we also have the ability to label how we are feeling.

That's where the wheel comes in. Without a vocabulary, most adults default to four or five emotion words — good, bad, fine, stressed, anxious — and the rest of what's actually happening inside goes unsaid. The wheel makes the other ninety visible. When the word restless or tender or weary lands on the page, the feeling becomes nameable, and naming it is the first step in changing your relationship with it.

The research behind the practice

The psychological research on emotional granularity — the capacity to identify and label what you feel with precision — gives this practice its evidence base.

Studies led by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues have found that people with higher emotional granularity show better emotional regulation under stress, drink less alcohol when distressed, are less likely to retaliate aggressively, and report better long-term mental health.² Functional MRI work by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues has shown that affect labelling — putting feelings into words — reduces activity in the amygdala (the brain region most associated with emotional reactivity) and engages prefrontal regions associated with regulation.³

The practical implication: when you can say I feel humiliated, not just bad, two things happen at once. You can think more clearly about the cause and the next move, and your body calms down faster. The wheel is the scaffolding that makes the more accurate word reachable in the moment.

How the Junto Emotion Wheel was made

Most articles about emotion wheels start with Robert Plutchik in 1980 or Gloria Willcox in 1982. The Junto Emotion Wheel didn't begin there.

The Junto Institute is a learning community for growth-stage company leaders, founded in 2012 by Raman Chadha. Originally based in Chicago and now headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, the Institute makes emotional intelligence one of the core pillars of its work. In Chadha's own account of the wheel's origin,⁴ the team was updating Junto's program and realised it lacked a tool for the labelling step. They tried existing scientifically-based wheels with their forums, their team and their families — and found them incomplete.

Specifically:

• There were far more negative emotions than positive ones.
• There were many scientifically identified feelings and emotions that weren't on the existing wheels.
• There were many emotions that people were actually identifying in practice but that didn't appear on any wheel.

So the Institute compiled its own list of feelings and emotions, hired a graphic designer, and built a wheel of its own — what is now the Junto Emotion Wheel.

The wheel was introduced to Junto's established forums in January 2016 and to a new cohort that February.⁴ It has been in continuous use inside the Institute's coaching work for the past decade. Member companies have brought it into 1:1 and group meetings, team huddles, company-wide town halls, interview icebreakers, the start and close of hard conversations, and discussions about mental health.

The interactive web and mobile version of the wheel — the one you can open at juntoemotionwheel.com — is the daily-practice companion to that work. The wheel itself, and the printed cardstock version, remain available from The Junto Institute.

The structure of the wheel

Each wedge of the Junto Emotion Wheel represents a core human emotion, and within that wedge are related ones. So while you may be in an overall good mood — Joy or Love — the more specific words let you identify the nuances and intricacies of that state of being.

The six core emotions and a sample of their secondary feelings:

Each secondary breaks down further into two tertiary feelings (e.g. peaceful → tranquil, serene; grateful → appreciative, thankful), bringing the total vocabulary to over 100 named emotions.

The arrangement around the disc is deliberate, with related families neighbouring each other, but you don't need to know the geometry to use the wheel. You need to know how to read it.

How to read the wheel

The Junto Institute's recommended practice — for use alone, in a forum, in a team meeting, or with a partner — is straightforward.

Think about how you're feeling right now or how you've been feeling recently, and select one or more of the core emotions. A rough fit is all you need at this point. Something in the joy family. Something near sadness. Maybe a mix.

From there, follow the colour wedges and choose related words in the middle and outer sections that may better reflect how you're feeling. Some words will obviously not fit. One or two will catch — that's the one.

Think about why you're feeling those emotions; take time to reflect or journal. This is the part the wheel can't do for you. Naming the emotion is the first step; the meaning of it is yours to find.

To build your self-awareness over time, use the wheel at different moments in a day, at different places you spend time, and when you are with different people. This is what the daily-practice version of the wheel is built for — a sixty-second check-in that compounds across weeks rather than across minutes.

When you're using the wheel in a group, the Junto Institute's guidance is to create a safe environment by not requiring anyone to participate. Listen intently to each person, watch non-verbal expressions, and try not to probe deeper — let each person share only what they want. As the Institute puts it: emotions can't be debated, argued, or refuted; they are personal to each of us, biologically and psychologically.

How the Junto Emotion Wheel compares to other wheels

For context, four emotion wheels are most often referenced in the literature.

The choice between them matters less than people sometimes think for daily naming. A six-family wheel and an eight-family wheel both serve the same purpose: handing you a richer vocabulary than you had a minute ago. Where the Junto Emotion Wheel differs is the balance — six families weighted equally between difficult emotions (sadness, fear, anger) and good ones (joy, love), with surprise sitting between — and the depth at the tertiary level.

Common misconceptions

A few things people often get wrong about emotion wheels.

"You're supposed to feel just one emotion at a time." Not true. Most emotional states are blends. When you read your own state, expect to land on two or three nearby words at once — that's accuracy, not indecision. The Junto Institute's group practice explicitly invites people to share more than one feeling, with reasons if they choose.

"The wheel tells you what's wrong with you." It doesn't. The wheel only tells you what to call what's happening. It says nothing about whether the emotion is appropriate, healthy, or a sign of anything pathological. That interpretation is yours — and if it's heavy, it's a job for a therapist, not a wheel.

"Negative emotions are bad." Every emotion family — including anger, fear, and sadness — exists for a reason and carries information. The Junto Emotion Wheel was specifically built to weight difficult and good emotions more evenly than existing wheels did; the practice is to name the emotion, not to judge it.

"More words is always better." Wheels with hundreds of emotions can be paralysing in the moment. The Junto Emotion Wheel stops at 100+ words: enough granularity to find your specific state, few enough that the choosing doesn't take longer than the feeling.

Limitations and when not to use one

An emotion wheel is a self-report tool. It works as well as your honesty with yourself in the moment, and it is not a substitute for professional support. If you are in acute crisis, are suicidal, or are living with untreated trauma, please contact a mental health professional. In the United States, dial 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). In the United Kingdom, Samaritans can be reached at 116 123. In other regions, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a directory.

A wheel also doesn't capture cultural specificity. Many emotions have names in one language and no exact equivalent in another (Portuguese saudade, Japanese amae, German Schadenfreude, Spanish desahogo). A wheel built in English will privilege the emotions English has clean words for. Take it as a useful starting point, not as a complete map of human emotional experience.

Try the Junto Emotion Wheel

The interactive Junto Emotion Wheel is free, on web, iOS and Android, with no credit card and no ads. The practice is short: tap an emotion, optionally write a sentence about the moment, and your check-ins assemble into a private record of how your emotional life has been moving. The wheel itself is offered as a daily-practice companion to The Junto Institute's executive-coaching work.

For the historical wheels referenced above, the primary sources are Plutchik, R. (1980), A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion, in Emotion: Theory, research, and experience (Academic Press); Willcox, G. (1982), The Feeling Wheel: A Tool for Expanding Awareness of Emotions and Increasing Spontaneity and Intimacy, Transactional Analysis Journal, 12(4), 274–276 (DOI); and Scherer, K. R. et al. (2013), The GRID meets the Wheel, in Components of Emotional Meaning: A sourcebook (Oxford University Press).

Further reading

• How to use an emotion wheel — a 60-second daily practice (coming soon)
• The Junto Institute on the Emotion Wheel — the canonical Institute article.
• The Building Blocks of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership — the framework that places self-awareness at the foundation of emotional intelligence.