Fostering a positive safety culture is essential and important for preventing individual and large-scale accidents. However, many accidents caused by people's unsafe behaviors occur because safety culture is poor, or some main elements of safety culture are missing. The two key objectives of this article are: (1) to propose people's emotional safety needs based on people's emotional needs and (2) to put forward emotional safety culture and analyze its role in behavior-based safety (BBS) management. First, the connotation of people's emotional safety needs was explained, which includes the need to love and to be loved, the need for self-perfection of safety humanity, and the need for realizing self-value to safety. Second, the connotation of emotional safety culture was analyzed. Meanwhile, the role of emotional safety culture in BBS management was explored. At last, the basic patterns and strategies of developing emotional safety culture were briefly discussed. Overall, emotional safety culture is one of the new and key elements of safety culture and is a feasible and effective approach to BBS management and developing a strong safety culture. (c) 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 37: 134-139, 2018