The present research focuses on the conceptualization of strong negative emotions experienced by the personages involved in conflicts, or quarrels, in contemporary British and Russian drama and approaches them from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The study attempts to reconstruct both potentially universal and culture-specific conceptual metaphors through the establishment of a set of correspondences or mappings between a ‘source’ and ‘taget’ domains. The materials yielded a number of culture-specific metaphors alongside with a number of potentially universal metaphors shared by the Anglo and Russian cultures, whose universality could be accounted for by the shared embodiment.