This paper presents an approach to feature compensation for emotion recognition from speech signals. In this approach, the intonation groups (IGs) of the input speech signals are extracted first. The speech features in each selected intonation group are then extracted. With the assumption of linear mapping between feature spaces in different emotional states, a feature compensation approach is proposed to characterize feature space with better discriminability among emotional states. The compensation vector with respect to each emotional state is estimated using the Minimum Classification Error (MCE) algorithm. For the final emotional state decision, the compensated IG-based feature vectors are used to train the Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and Continuous Support Vector Machine (CSVMs) for each emotional state. For GMMs, the emotional state with the GMM having the maximal likelihood ratio is determined as the final output. For CSVMs, the emotional state is determined according to the probability outputs from the CSVMs. The kernel function in CSVM is experimentally decided as a Radial basis function. A comparison in the experiments shows that the proposed IG-based feature compensation can obtain encouraging performance for emotion recognition.