The way people explain poverty in their society has been studied as a cause and driver of anxiety and discomfort. Negative emotions such as anger and aggression towards people in poverty are dominant when poverty is attributed to factors perceived as being under personal control, which include laziness and lack of willingness. In contrast, positive emotions dominate when poverty is attributed to external factors. Nevertheless, a criticism of these studies is that they have focused almost exclusively on asking respondents why people are poor or the reasons for poverty in their country. We point out that framing economic inequalities mainly as poverty runs the risk of making the system of relationships and social dynamics between economically advantaged and disadvantaged groups invisible, thus leading to a limitation in the study of emotional distress. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted an instrumental phase (n = 605) to identify distinct emotional responses to both economically disadvantaged and advantaged groups, as well as to economic inequality itself. Building on these findings, we carried out representative online population surveys in France, Great Britain, and Sweden (n = 9,000) to examine in greater detail the emotional responses elicited by different inequality-related stimuli and their relation to causal attributions. Differences in emotional responses to income and wealth inequality were minimal in France and Sweden and almost non-existent in Britain; however, they contrasted markedly with the emotions directed at specific groups such as poor people, rich people, social beneficiaries, and taxpayers. Moreover, we found systematic interrelations between emotions towards income and wealth inequality and the corresponding causal attributions in all three countries. Attributing economic inequality to disadvantaged individuals (relative to blaming the government) was linked to reduced experiences of sadness, moral outrage, anger, and frustration in response to both income and wealth inequality. Our findings suggest that emotional responses to economic inequality are likely multi-targeted and multi-valent, depending on how inequality is framed via different stimuli and on differences in perceived causal attributions.