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Background. Volunteering is an activity in which people are involved initiatively and voluntarily, in order to improve the living conditions of the community. Research shows the ever-increasing role of volunteers in solving social problems. However, the organizers of volunteer activity face with the problem of the insufficient level of sustainable involvement of people in volunteering. Student life is a period of active socialization when the volunteer activities of students allow them to acquire important qualities necessary for successful socialization. Emotions are the evidence of involvement ensuring the sustainability of motivation. Therefore, it is important to understand how students reflect volunteerism in their ideas which will allow the organizer of volunteer activities to form a sustainable motivation for participants. Sample. The study involved 173 university students. Objective: The goal is to identify the features of the emotional component of the image of volunteering in the perceptions of university students in psychological and educational areas. Methods. The thesaurus of emotive vocabulary by L.G. Babenko was used to compile the profile. Data collection was carried out by the method of limited associations. The task of the respondents was to give nine associations to the word "volunteer" in the form of the principle parts of speech (three verbs, three nouns, three adjectives). As a result, the frequency of these associations by categories of emotive vocabulary was revealed and a rating of these categories was formed. Results. The most frequent in terms of the number of associations used are the categories of emotive vocabulary: kindness, pity, sincerity, and joy. These emotive categories characterize the emotional component of the image of volunteering in the thesaurus of students. An analysis of denotative-ideographic groups, taking into account functional-semantic categories, shows that these categories are represented unevenly in students’ associations. The category of emotional attitude is the most pronounced while the categories of emotional impact and the emotional attitude are not represented at all. A rating of denotative-ideographic groups was built according to the frequency of associations about volunteering used by the respondents. Conclusion. The categories of emotive vocabulary are complementary to the content of volunteer activities. The emotional component of the image, identified with the help of denotative-ideographic groups and functional-semantic categories, reflects both the characteristics of the emotional regulation of volunteer activity and the personal constructs of students.