A number of recent studies have focused on the conceptualized expression of emotions as a three-dimensional space. This paper proposes a new approach to emotion recognition, making use of two of the emotional dimensions and their relationship with different kinds of features. The main idea consists in associating prosodic features, derived from pitch, loudness, and duration, with the activation or arousal dimension, and quality features, i.e. phonation type, articulation manner, voice timbre, with the evaluation and pleasure dimension, in a way that different classification methods can be applied for each specific case. Most important results are achieved for the speaker- independent case and three classes, with a recognition rate close to 80%.