 What are the formal objects of specific emotions? This is a controversial topic, because the ascription of formal objects commits one to the claim that each emotion, on conceptual grounds, ascribes a specific property to its particular object. This is often identified with one of a number of “core relational themes” originally offered by Richard Lazarus (1991a,b) to explain what sorts of evaluations cause emotions, one of the primary concerns of appraisal theories in psychology  (section 6).