The aim of the paper is a presentation of methodological foundations of semantics of emotion concepts in contrastive linguistic analyses and identifying the sources of data in Polish and English obtained by less frequently used research methods. The main assumption is the presence of not fully determinate concepts in linguistic semantics and the need to interpret emotion concepts in terms of prototypical meanings and cluster models. This requires the application of cognitive linguistics categories and cultural models of emotions and emotion events. The methodological part demonstrates the qualitative and quantitative nature of sources and research (GRID, sorting and ranking, cognitive linguistic analysis of corpus data, metaphoricity). The examples analyzed in fuller detail are Eng. compassion and Pol. współczucie in their respective emotion clusters. The conclusions present implications of this interdisciplinary and multimethod approach to develop a new methodology of contrastive research in emotion studies.