 Conceiving of gratitude as an emotion has a certain plausibility. The concept of emotion provides a familiar framework for integrating many of the cognitive, affective and conative elements of the grateful response under one conceptual roof. Nevertheless, conceptualizing gratitude as an emotion (and nothing more) comes at certain theoretical costs. The first stems from the fact that emotions are episodic: an emotion is typically not the sort of thing we experience or undergo continuously for years at a time. But though a beneficiary might go years without instantiating or experiencing the emotion of gratitude, he might still all that time be grateful to some benefactor for a genuine act of benevolence performed in the past, insofar as he is properly disposed to believe, feel and act toward her as a grateful beneficiary should. An analogy with the emotion of love is helpful here. It is (often) true that I love my mother in moments when I do not experience any emotion of love regarding her (in moments when my full attention is on some other emotionally salient object, say). This suggests that whatever love is, it must be more than the emotion of love. So too for gratitude.