The title Emotions at Work is deliberately ambiguous, hence the subtitle ‘‘Theory, research and applications in management’’. The title does, of course, convey the central focus of the book which is on emotions in the workplace, but the other possible meaning of ‘‘emotions at work’’ is a concern with the processes involved in the production of emotional experience. The first part of the book is entitled ‘‘The nature of emotion’’ and it introduces the reader to what is known about emotions and the processes that bring them into being. Chapter 1 is by Robb Stanley and Graham Burrows from the Department of Psychiatry at Melbourne University. They define emotions and list some of the main emotions described by workers in the field. They also describe the emotional process, strongly linking emotion to motivation and behaviour. The chapter also deals with the function of emotions in this overall process, describing the range of positive and negative emotions and their significance in detecting conditions which may be of clinical significance. The conceptual and empirical difficulty of being precise in this field is strongly signalled.