The article is devoted to the study of emotive phraseological units of the modern English language, which reveal universal properties of human language ability, culturally determined differences in its organization and functioning, reflection in language of correlations between emotions and the psychophysiological state of the human body. The article analyzes the peculiarities of the semantics of emotive phraseological units, defines the somatic component in the composition of phraseological units that denote human emotions. Various models of negative and positive emotional actions, which are objectified in phraseological units, are identified, verbal and non-verbal means of expressing emotions in phraseological units are considered. The results of the semantic analysis are given, which testify to the universality and reveal the specific features of the verbalization of emotions in the English-speaking culture. The research material contains English idioms denoting negative and positive human emotions, selected by the method of continuous sampling from monolingual English dictionaries.