Plutchik's wheel of emotion, polarity vs. sentiment

1. Plutchik's wheel of emotion, polarity vs. sentiment

Welcome back! At this point you have a decent handle on polarity. Remember, polarity is the positive or negative aspects of text. However, human emotions are more diverse. For example, if you get hit by a bus you are probably surprised in a negative way and if you win the lottery you are probably surprised in a positive way.

2. In reality, sentiment is more complex than +/-

In reality, sentiment is more complex than simply positive or negative. In fact, consider the number of emoji on your smartphone. Many of them are devoted to expressing emotions in some form…even the happy poo. There are multiple emotional frameworks from many disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and psychology.

3. Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion

One popular framework is called Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion. This framework uses a visualization consisting of eight primary emotions including joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. According to Plutchik, these primary emotions were learned throughout evolution. In his mind, all other emotions are derivative of the basic eight learned throughout the millennia. For example, remorse is a mixture of disgust and sadness. Within the wheel itself each emotion has an opposite across from it and similar emotions are adjacent. Further, the intensity of the emotions increases as you move towards the center of the wheel and likewise diminish as you move outward. So remorse is actually a very diminished form of disgust and sadness. Similarly, ecstasy is an acute form of joy. Of course this is just one framework and coincidentally a relatively simple one.

4. A more complex emotional framework

Here is another framework from Kanjoya, a company specializing in sentiment analysis. You can see the number of emotions and their relationships are much more diverse. They gathered this data from the experienceproject-dot-com. By tracking their users' stories and their explicit emotional declaration when writing, Kanjoya observed the journey of people from depressed to calm, to tired, and then to happy over time. So if you are ever depressed you should not expect to simply become happy. It takes time and is an emotional journey. The experienceproject-dot-com users demonstrate this behavior.

5. Sentiment with Tidy Data

In this chapter you will go beyond polarity's positive and negative to explore the basic eight emotions of Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion based on evolution, and other ways to quantify emotional intensity.

6. Let's practice!

Now let's try some examples!

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