When people (including psychologists) talk about emotions, they usually assume that they are describing something that goes on simply inside the individual mind or body, and that can be easily isolated, pinned down and dissected. Brian Parkinson shows that the relationship between ideas and reality, or words and things, is far more complex.

He gets to 'the heart of emotion by denying that the personal heart has much to do with it' and looks at emotion in real-time encounters between people, expressed in gesture and movement, talk and silence.

Ideas and Realities of Emotion presents a clear and concise overview of state-of-the-art research into emotion, focusing on cognitive appraisal, bodily changes, action tendencies and expressive displays. The book challenges the idea of emotion as an individual intrapsychic phenomenon, and formulates a new and distinctive conceptual framework based on the idea of emotion as interpersonal communication - a social practice influenced by culture and language.

Ideas and Realities of Emotion will prove invaluable to all those approaching emotion from a social psychological perspective, whether at advanced undergraduate or graduate level.