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Robert Plutchik (1927–2006)

Article  in  American Psychologist · February 2007

DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.62.2.142

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 Robert Plutchik (1927–2006)
Robert Plutchik died in Sarasota, Florida, on April 29, 2006,
at the age of 78. He was a pioneer in emotion theory, and his
influence on the discipline of psychology runs both wide and
deep. His survivors include Anita Plutchik, his wife of 44
years; daughters Lisa Silva of Sarasota and Lori Plutchik of
New York City; a son, Roy, of Dallas; and three grandchildren.
Rob was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 21,
1927. His parents were Leon and Libba Plutchik. His father
worked as a tailor in the garment industry in New York City.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
He and his grandfather, parents, and brother Henry lived
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
together in a tiny one-bedroom walkup. Rob received a full
scholarship at City College of New York and earned his
master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. He
went on to teach at Hofstra, Columbia, and Long Island
universities, ultimately becoming professor emeritus of psy-
chiatry and psychology at the Albert Einstein College of
Medicine and upon retirement, adjunct professor at the Uni-
versity of South Florida. He was a fellow of the American
Psychological Association and a member of both the Inter-
national Society for Research on Emotions and Sigma XI.
Rob published several hundred research papers and
chapters, but he was probably best known for his scholarly
books of theory and synthesis in the field of emotions. His
first book, The Emotions: Facts, Theories and a New Model
(1962), was published in an older world of psychological
research in which an interest in emotions was eccentric. In
current psychology, such an interest has become respectable,
if not fashionable. He was one of the pioneers who built
bridges from the older world to the new. In his most recent
book, Emotions and Life: Perspectives From Psychology,
Biology, and Evolution (2003), he reviewed a wide array of
topics that included the history of emotion research, the
language and measurement of emotions, facial expressions,
emotional development, communication and social behav-
ior, emotions and the brain, and emotional disorders.
One theoretical contribution for which Rob became
widely known was his belief that there are a small number of
primary emotions. This idea went back via Darwin to Des-
cartes and Aristotle. In any modern discussion of it, the
name Plutchik is present. Each primary emotion, he pro-
posed, is identifiable in many other animals besides humans
and is devoted to some prototypical task in survival. Although
in the laboratory, primary emotions may be discovered in pure
form, in ordinary life, as well as in the psychiatric clinic, they
tend to come in mixtures. Rob offered diagrams showing which
emotions were opposites and which were similar to each other.
A second influential idea of his was that emotions are
evolutionary adaptations. In Darwin’s The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), from which Rob drew
inspiration, emotions in adult humans were considered
rather in the way that the appendix is considered in the
human digestive system: as evidence that our ancestors were
once quite different from us. Darwin drew attention to the
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human sneer, in which a canine tooth is bared although
modern adult humans seldom bite each other, and to hair
standing on end in fear or anger, although such piloerection
does nothing to make us look bigger in the way that it does
in apes. It was, therefore, rather a bold move on Rob’s part
to deemphasize these vestigial aspects and to propose that
emotions— even in modern humans—“represent proximate
methods to achieve ultimate goals of inclusive fitness” (from
a 1991 paper entitled “Emotions and Evolution” that ap-
peared in K. T. Strongman’s edited book International Re-
view of Studies on Emotion, Vol. 1, p. 51), adding to Dar-
win’s idea of fitness altruistic behaviors such as parenting that
help the passage of genes to the next generation. This idea,
grounded in biology and physiology, is now scarcely contro-
versial. It is, indeed, the basis for much influential theorizing.
A third influential idea propounded by Rob Plutchik
was that there is a link between people’s emotional lives and
their personalities. Rob called the link a derivative: The way
in which personality is conceptualized and described in
language derives from emotions. Thus hostility derives from
a mixture of anger and disgust, sociability is a blend of joy
and acceptance, and so on. The idea also extends to diag-
nostic categories in psychiatry, so that diagnoses such as
mania, depression, and anxiety derive from extended and
extreme emotions of joy, sadness, and fear, respectively.
Few theorists now think of distinct traits of personality or of
the major categories of psychiatric diagnosis as existing
without core components of emotionality.
Rob had another side as a gifted artist, a sculptor of
wood and granite, and a poet whose work appeared in World
of Emotions: Poems, Etchings, and Sculptures by Robert
Plutchik (2006, Pagefree Publishing). A poem to his young-
est grandchild, “Welcoming Joshua” (p. 259), concluded
with these memorable lines:
Some people say there is nothing new under the sun,
But you are new, unique, and beautiful, dear grandson.
May you gather wisdom as you grow,
And gently move with grace through life’s capricious flow.
In his wise, gentle, and graceful way, Robert Plutchik
exerted a powerful influence on the spread of the study of
emotion from a sideline to a main concern not only in psychol-
ogy, but in biology, in the social sciences, in psychiatry, and
even in the humanities. Thus, among the most recent books in
a growing output of books on emotions is one by David
Konstan, a prominent classics scholar: The Emotions of the
Ancient Greeks (2006, University of Toronto Press). One turns
to the bibliography, and there is Plutchik.
Ross Buck
University of Connecticut
Keith Oatley
University of Toronto
February–March 2007 ● American Psychologist
Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association 0003-066X/07/$12.00
Vol. 62, No. 2, 142 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.62.2.142