The purpose of this study is to provide the cross-linguistic comparison on the complement patterns and Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) explications for two sets of three AFRAID-group emotion words in English and Chinese: afraid, frightened, and terrified for English and hai pa de(害怕的), shou jīng de(受惊的), and kǒng ju de(恐惧的) for Chinese. This study also examines the nearest one-to-one correspondences between the words in English and Chinese. The followings are discussed from statistical analysis of 1200 instances from the corpus data in English and Chinese. (1) The ordinary English and Chinese dictionaries provide limited or no complement patterns of English and Chinese AFRAID-group emotion words. (2) NSM analysis can be successfully adopted to provide the semantic explications of Chinese emotion words as well as English ones. (3) English AFRAID-group words have certain differences from Chinese counterparts in terms of degrees of event intensity, the time of bad events (i.e., in the past or future), and experiencers’ desirability to make reactions.