In the art therapy group I facilitate, I used this “ice breaker” exercise and found it to be exploratory and participants were able to express more clearly their emotions. Additionally, it helps to put the present emotions into perspective by seeing it in the context of equal parts of the full circle. It helps to gain insight into what is really going on in the current moment. You can fasten a triangle window for students to select a specific emotion. You can show your students the emotions color wheel and have them color in theirs to match how they feel. This exercise helps the client to explore and release feelings by drawing and writing them out. This resource includes two printable options, one with color and one with black and white.
When the clients are finished colouring or painting, they may explain if they feel comfortable enough within the group, what made them choose a particular colour, or explain what the picture means. Clients are then asked to fill in each pie with a corresponding color or picture that matches his/her idea of what the emotion means to him/her. The 8 primary emotions are arranged by colors that establish a set of similar emotions.
The 8 primary emotions are joy, trust, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, anticipation and sadness. Additionally the client writes the emotions above each section (on the outside). Plutchik created a wheel of emotions to illustrate the combinations of emotions and to describe how emotions are related. This wheel is based on eight primary emotions, and it shows the relationships among them. He created the wheel of emotions, which illustrates the various relationships among the emotions.Īdapted to an art therapy theme, the wheel is divided into 8 sections the client thinks about different emotions that came up for them during the day. An emotion wheel is a tool that can help you identify and understand your feelings. Robert Plutchik stated that there are eight basic emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, anticipation, anger, and disgust. Robert Plutchik (1927 –2006) was a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, professor at the University of South Florida and he was also a psychologist.