Empirical and theoretical advances in human neuroscience have led to a reappraisal of the relationships between mind, brain and body, the implications of which are particularly relevant to understanding emotions, which is revealed to be embodied owing to the facts that they are on the one hand primarily arise from the internal bodily states controlled by interoceptive system, on the other they give rise to physiological reactions and physical action evoked by autonomic nervous system. More specifically, when considering the ‘embodied mind’ (i.e., how mental processes are inescapably contextualized by their location within the body), the brain, instead of the ‘master’ of the body, is increasingly revealed to function as the ‘servant’, with its primary goal to maintain the body’s homeostatic integrity. This is achieved through the control of interoceptive information concerning body’s physiological state, initially as ‘simple’ organ-level homeostatic reflexes and then through higher-order coordination across organ-systems allowing ‘allostatic policies’ to predict and maintain future health of the integrated whole ‘biological-self’. In this context, motivational and emotional feelings arise from interoceptive signals that accompany (motivational and emotional) internally-directed physiological responses, and externally-directed behaviors. Emotion concepts are thus the categorized embodied outcomes of bidirectional brain-body interactions and may arguably be differentiated into afferent interoceptive processes, i.e., from body to brain, and efferent/autonomic processes, i.e., from brain to body. When comparing emotion words used in Chinese and English languages, afferent/interoceptive processes seem to dominate conceptualization of embodied emotions in Chinese, while the efferent processes feature more commonly in English. The presence of distinct conceptual systems relating to emotions may, according to the linguistic relativity hypothesis as well as the theory of constructed emotion, significantly shape the distinct values and ‘national character’ of Chinese and English–speaking cultures. Correspondingly, it is argued that, in the expression of affective traits, Chinese-speaking people are biased towards being more receptive, reflective and adaptive, whereas native English speakers may tend to be more reactive, proactive and interactive. These patterns also encompass functions historically ascribed to bodily organs by traditional Chinese and ancient Greek medicine.