Robert Plutchik

Robert Plutchik (1927-2006) was an American psychologist whose work focused on emotions from an evolutionary standpoint. He is best known for the Wheel of Emotions, a graphic model showing how human emotional states relate to one another.

Born in Brooklyn, he earned a scholarship to the City College of New York and completed his master's and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. He taught at several institutions, including Hofstra University and the Bronx State Hospital, and became a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He later became an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida. Among his books are The Emotions: Facts, Theories, and a New Model (1962) and Emotions and Life (2003). He was also an artist and poet.

His psychoevolutionary theory holds that emotions are adaptations that helped organisms survive, and that they appear across species. He proposed eight primary emotions, arranged in pairs of opposites, and argued that other emotions are mixtures of them. Each emotion can vary in intensity, which the wheel shows through the strength of its color.

His model has been applied in psychological research, psychotherapy, marketing, artificial intelligence and media studies. It remains a common reference in emotional education.