Emotions are slightly different than feelings and here is how:

Emotions
• Originate in your body
• Reactions in response to specific events
• Mental & Physiological changes that can be measured
• Trigger the body to react a certain way like increased heart rate
• Happen automatically without us choosing

Feelings
• Originate in your mind
• How we think things feel in our body that cannot be measured
• Not always related to emotion (cold isn’t an emotion)
• Gives us information from our 5 senses
• One component of emotion

For more details on feelings, be sure to check out our lists of Feelings Adjectives.

How do we figure out which of thousands of emotions we’re feeling? A scientist named Dr. Robert Plutchik researched emotions and proposed that there are certain main emotions that influence all others. They serve as foundational emotions or core emotions. You can see these in the center of the wheel below. Scientists have continued to develop this theory by making more Emotions Wheels to help us identify exactly how we’re feeling.

So, if you look at the wheel, you’ll see that ANGRY is an emotion in the center. The further you move out on the wheel, the less strong your emotions will be.

If you’re looking to express a strong emotion, use the center wheel, and if you have a nuance of that emotion, move towards the outer circle of the wheel.

Here is a list of the words in the Wheel of Emotions:

Remember that there are different variations of this wheel that you can use to find more emotion words. And, you can always use a thesaurus to discover more words that relate to these specific emotions.