The paper considers emotional-intellectual states related to interest and compares some parameters of these states from the standpoint of psychology and cognitive linguistics. Based on monologue speech, it investigates possible combinations of intellectual emotions, explicit and implicit ways of their representations, and functions in the descriptions of fictional characters’ verbal and cognitive activities. This paper discusses the identification and definition of the given lexical sample in terms of combinatory and intentional states of emotions in the context of monologue speech found in English fiction of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. It provides a thorough analysis of the characters’ emotional-intellectual state, given by the author, and a detailed description of their non-verbal behavior. We used such methods as a pragma-semantic analysis, a pragma-cognitive analysis, and a linguistic interpretation of episodes in the original (English) works of fiction. The application of the pragma-cognitive method for a data analysis is conditioned by the need to study the intentional state of emotions and the relative verbal behavior of the characters in the context of these works of fiction.