Previous work has shown that the abstract use of the prepositions in and on retains spatial meaning, such as containment and support that includes the control relationship between a located object (the figure) and a reference object (the ground). We extend these ideas to the case of metaphorical descriptions of emotion in Spanish – some of them featuring the emotion as a located entity in the person´s body, and some of them featuring emotion as the ground in which the person´s body stands. Two rating experiments show that people judge emotions as more “controllable” when they are described as located entities (the figure) than when they are described as grounds.