This handout is designed to support therapists in exploring emotions with clients, and to help clients make sense of their emotional experiences. By offering a structured framework for understanding feelings, it serves as both a psychoeducational tool and a catalyst for therapeutic conversation.
Offers theory, guidance, and prompts for mental health professionals. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
Includes client-friendly guidance. Downloads are in Fillable PDF format where appropriate.
An editable Microsoft PowerPoint version of the resource.
Emotions are central to human experience but often difficult to describe. This resource introduces a hierarchical model of emotions, based on research by Shaver and colleagues (1987), which organizes feelings around a small set of basic prototypes — such as love, joy, anger, sadness, and fear — and expands into more specific secondary and tertiary emotions. By reflecting how people naturally understand emotions, the model supports emotional literacy, encourages richer discussions, and helps clients make better sense of their experiences.
Understanding emotions helps clients and therapists identify patterns and make sense of underlying emotional issues.
Helps individuals who struggle to identify and describe their emotions.
Encourages gentle exploration of avoided or suppressed feelings.
Builds vocabulary and awareness for those with limited emotional insight.
Provides a structured tool for guiding emotional education and discussion.
Introduce the emotional hierarchy and explore how emotions can be grouped and differentiated.
Use the model as a prompt to explore clients’ emotional experiences in depth.
Work together to identify core emotions and trace their secondary and tertiary expressions.
Encourage clients to consider how emotions relate to situations, thoughts, and other feelings.
Incorporate the model into emotion regulation work or formulation.
Return to the handout periodically to track progress and deepen understanding.
Psychologists have suggested different classifications of emotions, but no single system has gained universal agreement. Theorists have proposed various sets of "basic emotions," each grounded in different assumptions. Some, like William James (1884), focused on the physiological sensations associated with emotions; others, such as Paul Ekman and colleagues (1982), emphasized universally recognised facial expressions; while researchers like Plutchik (1980) proposed evolutionary models based on adaptive functions. Across these theories, certain emotions — such as anger, fear, joy, and sadness — consistently appear, yet there is meaningful variation in which emotions are considered “basic,” and how more complex feelings are understood to arise from them.
This resource is grounded in the hierarchical model developed by Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, and O’Connor (1987), who approached emotion classification using prototype theory. Rather than assuming clear-cut boundaries between emotional categories, they investigated how people naturally sort emotion terms. Through cluster analyses of similarity ratings, they found that people intuitively group emotions into a small number of broad categories — love, joy, anger, sadness, and fear — with each category branching into increasingly specific secondary and tertiary emotions. These categories are not rigid but reflect how language and lived experience shape our understanding of feelings.
This model provides therapists and clients with a shared structure for exploring emotional experience — especially helpful for individuals who struggle to identify or articulate their emotions, such as those with alexithymia or low emotional awareness. While no single taxonomy of emotions is definitive, Shaver et al.'s hierarchy offers a useful and intuitive framework that resonates with how emotions are experienced, talked about, and processed in therapy.
