An effective method based on GMM is proposed in this paper for speech emotional recognition; a compensation transformation is introduced in the recognition stage to reduce the influence of variations in speech characteristics and noise. The extraction of emotional features includes the globe feature, time series structure feature, LPCC, MFCC and PLP. Five human emotions (happiness, angry, surprise, sadness and neutral) are investigated. The result shows that it can increase the recognition ratio more than normal GMM; the method in this paper is effective and robust.