 An alternative embraced by some contemporary feeling theorists is to argue that emotions are feelings devoid of any intentional objects. The contrary impression is an illusion, deriving from the fact that the feelings we call emotions are typically caused by thoughts with an intentional structure with which they are associated in a “composite” experience (Whiting 2011; Goldstein 2002). On this view, fear of the ice is a composite mental state consisting of an emotion—the objectless feeling of fear—plus a thought with the ice as its intentional object. In themselves, emotions are merely hedonic feelings without intentionality. The grounds claimed for this view are explicitly phenomenological, however, and since most researchers’ introspection appears to deliver the contrary verdict that emotions are themselves object-directed, the composite view fails to persuade (for a different argument for objectlessness based on social psychology data, see Shargel 2015).