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.