Methodology

Methodology

The framework the wheel sits inside, the specific design decisions behind it, and what we don't claim it does.

The Junto Emotion Wheel is built inside The Junto Institute's proprietary Building Blocks of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership framework — four levels addressing the four domains of emotional intelligence, sixteen blocks covering dozens of competencies. Self-awareness is the foundational block, and the wheel exists to make the labelling step inside self-awareness practicable. The wheel itself organises 100+ feelings around six core emotions, weighted to give difficult and good emotions equal coverage, deliberately stopping short of the hundreds-of-words wheels that paralyse decision-making in the moment.

The Building Blocks of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

The Junto Emotion Wheel doesn't sit on its own. It is one expression of a larger framework The Junto Institute has developed across more than a decade of work with growth-stage company leaders.

That framework is called the Building Blocks of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership. It is structured into:

• Four levels — addressing the four domains of emotional intelligence (mapping to Daniel Goleman's well-known four-domain model: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management).
• Sixteen individual blocks — covering dozens of underlying emotional-intelligence competencies.
• Dozens of competencies — the practical skills the blocks unpack into.

The Institute teaches this framework as a "simple model that allows you to remember, reference, and practice core concepts." The metaphor is deliberate: building blocks. If the bottom blocks are shaky or weak, the higher levels collapse — so leading others starts with leading yourself.¹

The full visual of the framework — The-Junto-Institute-Building-Blocks-2024 — is published on thejuntoinstitute.com/our-framework. We deliberately don't reproduce the 16 individual block names here; the framework is the Institute's, and the canonical version lives there. What this site is concerned with is one specific block and the tool that supports its practice.

Self-awareness as the foundational block

Inside the four-level framework, self-awareness is the block at the foundation — the one everything else rests on. The Junto Institute defines it precisely:

"The ability to recognise your own emotions and mood, your thoughts about them, and how those thoughts are connected with your behaviour."²

Three parts to that definition, not one. Self-awareness is:

1. Recognising your own emotions and mood — the labelling step.
2. The thoughts you have about those emotions — the meta-layer, what you're telling yourself about what you're feeling.
3. How those thoughts and feelings connect to your behaviour — the bridge into action.

The Junto Institute's argument is that none of (2) or (3) can happen reliably unless (1) is in place. If you can't accurately name what you're feeling, the thoughts you have about it are guessing, and the behaviour those thoughts produce is a guess too. The whole stack wobbles.

The Junto Emotion Wheel exists to make step 1 practicable, daily, in seconds.

Why a wheel, and why this one

There is a substantial psychological literature on emotional granularity — the capacity to identify and label what one feels with precision. Higher emotional granularity is associated with better emotional regulation under stress, less alcohol use when distressed, less aggressive retaliation, and better long-term mental-health outcomes.³ Affect-labelling research has shown that the act of putting feelings into words reduces amygdala activity (the brain region most associated with emotional reactivity) and engages prefrontal regions associated with regulation.⁴

So the question isn't "should we name emotions?" — that part is settled. The question is "what tool makes the naming step easier in the moment when someone genuinely doesn't have a word for what is moving in them?"

A circular vocabulary map — an emotion wheel — does this well. It collapses to broad families when you don't know what you feel, expands to specific words when you do, and surfaces emotional vocabulary you wouldn't reach for unprompted. The wheels created by Robert Plutchik (1980)⁵ and Gloria Willcox (1982)⁶ established the format. The Geneva Emotion Wheel (Scherer and colleagues, mid-2000s)⁷ developed an academic research instrument with rated intensities.

The Junto Emotion Wheel was designed after those — and specifically because the Junto team, preparing a new program cohort in 2016, tried the existing wheels and found them incomplete. In Raman Chadha's own account:⁸

• Existing wheels had "far more negative emotions than positive ones."
• They were "missing many scientifically identified feelings and emotions."
• They were missing "many emotions that people were actually identifying" in practice.

So Junto compiled its own list of feelings and emotions, hired a graphic designer, and produced its own wheel. The team introduced it to established forums in January 2016 and to a new cohort that February.

Design decisions

A few decisions distinguish the Junto Emotion Wheel from the wheels that preceded it.

Six core families, balanced. The wheel uses six primary emotions — joy, love, sadness, fear, anger, surprise — three of which are conventionally read as "positive" (joy, love, surprise) and three as "difficult" (sadness, fear, anger). That balance is deliberate. The Institute found that earlier wheels skewed negative; the Junto wheel was built to give difficult and good emotional terrain roughly equal real-estate.

Granularity that's useful, not paralysing. The wheel contains more than 100 named feelings across the six families. Each family branches into five to eight secondary feelings, and each secondary into two tertiary ones. That is more vocabulary than the typical adult reaches for unprompted, but far less than the wheels that pile on hundreds of words. The cap is intentional: enough granularity to find your specific state in the moment, few enough that the choosing doesn't take longer than the feeling.

Practice-shaped, not theory-shaped. Where earlier wheels lean toward academic taxonomy (the Geneva Emotion Wheel was explicitly designed as a research instrument), the Junto wheel was designed for use inside a forum, a team meeting, or a 1:1. The arrangement makes a quick visual scan possible. The vocabulary uses ordinary English words. The whole thing fits on a single sheet of cardstock.

The daily-practice version

The site you are reading — juntoemotionwheel.com — is the digital, daily-practice companion to the printed cardstock wheel. It exists for one reason: the practice compounds.

A single check-in doesn't do much. Doing the practice once a day for a few weeks does — that's what the granularity and affect-labelling research shows, and what teams using the wheel inside coaching contexts have observed for the past decade. The digital version makes the daily cadence possible without paper or memory: you open the wheel, tap an emotion, optionally write a short sentence about the moment, and your check-ins assemble into a private record over time.

The practice itself is described step-by-step in how to use an emotion wheel. The structure of the wheel and the six families is described in what is an emotion wheel.

What we don't claim

A few claims this site explicitly does not make.

The wheel is not therapy. It is a self-report tool that supports the labelling step of self-awareness. It does not diagnose, treat, or replace professional mental-health support. If you are in acute distress, 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. For other regions, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a directory.

The wheel doesn't tell you what to feel. It only offers vocabulary for what you already feel. The interpretation, the meaning, and what to do next are yours.

The wheel isn't a complete map of human emotion. It is a tool in English with English-derived vocabulary. Many emotions have names in one language and no exact equivalent in another. Treat the wheel as a useful starting point, not as a universal map.

Daily-practice ≠ daily obligation. The practice works when it is short and consistent. It does not require five-minute journaling, structured questions, or rigid scheduling. Sixty seconds is enough. Skipping a day doesn't break anything.