Robert Plutchik's 'wheel' of eight basic emotions. Plutchik suggests that these basic emotions are biologically primitive, and are shared in modified forms across animal clades. Their role is to increase the reproductive fitness of the animal. They trigger behaviours with high survival value, for example fear results in the fight-or-flight response. Plutchick's analysis implies that our human complex emotions are a mixture of these basic responses (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
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