Narratives are cognitive means of organizing and constructing our experience in a particular way. In emotion narratives, narrators do more than report propositional information; they need to attract the listener’s empathy and understanding. By applying sociocognitive and functional models of language and discourse (Herman 2003; Redeker 2006; Bernárdez 2008) in order to complement the Labovian approach to narratives, this study shows (i) that, in this specific text type, evaluation – the expression of the narrator’s emotions – is not an independent section, but suffuses the whole texts from beginning to end, and (ii) that the recurrent linguistic and pragmatic strategies chosen in order to disclose highly personal information – discourse markers, repetitions, repairs, profusion of details, etc. – are related to the specific linguistic activity and discourse context.