An Emotion ‘Tasting’ Chart
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about emotion in fiction — how to convey it, how to evoke it. I have a lot to say about it and am sure that my comments will evolve and grow over time. For today, I simply want to point you to a very interesting chart that breaks emotions down from the primary feelings of love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear (there’s some debate on what the primary feelings are, by the way) to the secondary and tertiary emotions that those primary feelings embody.
I think this chart can be quite useful when developing the emotions of a character or the emotional arc of a scene. The chart reminds me of a wine tasting wheel like this one, which breaks down primary tastes and aromas into their subtler elements.
Credits: Jenny Downing Flickr Creative Commons (top photo); W. Parrott, Emotions in Social Psychology, Psychology Press (chart)
Tracy Staedter 
That’s really useful, worth printing and pasting to the wall.
Me too!
Interesting. Here is another link to “human emotions” http://www.findingauthentichappiness.com/list-of-emotions.html
That’s a great one! I like how the ultra low-frequency emotion rated at 0 is “death.” Talk about feeling low.
You did it! A perfect way of talking about how to evoke emotion.
Ha ha. Well, I have a lot more to say on this topic! 🙂
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