A major novel focus of our investigation was to employ three complementary methodological paradigms—GRID, online emotions sorting and corpus linguistics—to investigate previous findings that sadness was rated higher than its Polish equivalent, smutek, on the arousal and power dimensions (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & Wilson, 2024) and that fear was rated higher than its Polish equivalent, strach, on the power dimension (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Wilson & Niiya, 2013). Convergent evidence from all three methodologies supported hypothesis two, showing that smutek and strach are conceptualised as having greater conceptual proximity than their British English equivalents, sadness and fear. The salience of sadness in Polish culture suggests that the relatively lower power of strach may reflect the low power associated with smutek. Corpus findings also revealed a strong association between British English fear and anger, suggesting that the high power of anger may contribute to the salience of high power in fear. Online emotions data showing stronger co-occurrences between sadness and British English anger-cluster concepts than between smutek and Polish anger-cluster concepts support hypothesis three. However, hypothesis one was not supported: British English anger was not rated higher than Polish złość ‘anger 1’ and gniew ‘anger 2’ on arousal and power.