The paper confronts on empirical grounds one of Conceptual Metaphor Theory’s foundational claims, namely that emotion concepts are (either entirely or partially) metaphorically structured. Both strong and week interpretations of this claim are examined by means of a study based on corpus data collected in six languages. The results show that metaphor does not structure aspects of our emotion knowledge, as claimed, but rather the emotion concepts seems to have structures of their own, independent of metaphor. Rather than being necessary for structuring emotion concepts, the metaphor emerges as a basic need for communicative expressiveness in discourse.