The article tries to retrace the paths of the semantic development of some Slavic borrowings, which in the history of the Romanian language designate ‘fear’ at different degrees of this emotion: timidity, dread, fear or fright. Five word families have been examined: groază, a se (în)crâncena, scârbă, a se stidi, a se oțărî. As a result of the etymological analysis, various semantic changes have been established. The research on the semantic evolution of the Slavic loanwords in Romanian in the field of emotional vocabulary shows above all that these particular cases reveal the tendency of mixing emotions. The same tendency can be observed when we analyze the autochthonous words from different Indo-European languages.