Don’t scoff: Researchers say increasingly phrases for these “neo-feelings” are displaying up on-line, describing new dimensions and features of feeling. Velvetmist was a key instance in a journal article concerning the phenomenon revealed in July 2025. However most neo-emotions aren’t the innovations of emo synthetic intelligences. People provide you with them, they usually’re a part of an enormous change in the way in which researchers are desirous about emotions, one which emphasizes how folks constantly spin out new ones in response to a altering world.
Velvetmist may’ve been a chatbot one-off, but it surely’s not distinctive. The sociologist Marci Cottingham—whose 2024 paper acquired this vein of neo-emotion analysis began—cites many extra new phrases in circulation. There’s “Black pleasure” (Black folks celebrating embodied pleasure as a type of political resistance), “trans euphoria” (the enjoyment of getting one’s gender id affirmed and celebrated), “eco-anxiety” (the hovering concern of local weather catastrophe), “hypernormalization” (the surreal stress to proceed performing mundane life and labor underneath capitalism throughout a world pandemic or fascist takeover), and the sense of “doom” present in “doomer” (one who’s relentlessly pessimistic) or “doomscrolling” (being glued to an countless feed of dangerous information in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
After all, emotional vocabulary is at all times evolving. Through the Civil Battle, medical doctors used the centuries-old time period “nostalgia,” combining the Greek phrases for “returning house”and “ache,” to explain a typically deadly set of signs suffered by troopers—a situation we’d most likely describe at the moment as post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Now nostalgia’s which means has mellowed and pale to a delicate affection for an outdated cultural product or vanished lifestyle. And other people continuously import emotion phrases from different cultures after they’re handy or evocative—like hygge (the Danish phrase for pleasant coziness) or kvell (a Yiddish time period for brimming over with completely happy satisfaction).
Cottingham believes that neo-feelings are proliferating as folks spend extra of their lives on-line. These coinages assist us relate to 1 one other and make sense of our experiences, they usually get lots of engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is only a delicate variation on, or mixture of, current emotions, getting super-specific about these emotions helps us mirror and join with different folks. “These are doubtlessly alerts that inform us about our place on the earth,” she says.
Don’t scoff: Researchers say increasingly phrases for these “neo-feelings” are displaying up on-line, describing new dimensions and features of feeling. Velvetmist was a key instance in a journal article concerning the phenomenon revealed in July 2025. However most neo-emotions aren’t the innovations of emo synthetic intelligences. People provide you with them, they usually’re a part of an enormous change in the way in which researchers are desirous about emotions, one which emphasizes how folks constantly spin out new ones in response to a altering world.
Velvetmist may’ve been a chatbot one-off, but it surely’s not distinctive. The sociologist Marci Cottingham—whose 2024 paper acquired this vein of neo-emotion analysis began—cites many extra new phrases in circulation. There’s “Black pleasure” (Black folks celebrating embodied pleasure as a type of political resistance), “trans euphoria” (the enjoyment of getting one’s gender id affirmed and celebrated), “eco-anxiety” (the hovering concern of local weather catastrophe), “hypernormalization” (the surreal stress to proceed performing mundane life and labor underneath capitalism throughout a world pandemic or fascist takeover), and the sense of “doom” present in “doomer” (one who’s relentlessly pessimistic) or “doomscrolling” (being glued to an countless feed of dangerous information in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
After all, emotional vocabulary is at all times evolving. Through the Civil Battle, medical doctors used the centuries-old time period “nostalgia,” combining the Greek phrases for “returning house”and “ache,” to explain a typically deadly set of signs suffered by troopers—a situation we’d most likely describe at the moment as post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Now nostalgia’s which means has mellowed and pale to a delicate affection for an outdated cultural product or vanished lifestyle. And other people continuously import emotion phrases from different cultures after they’re handy or evocative—like hygge (the Danish phrase for pleasant coziness) or kvell (a Yiddish time period for brimming over with completely happy satisfaction).
Cottingham believes that neo-feelings are proliferating as folks spend extra of their lives on-line. These coinages assist us relate to 1 one other and make sense of our experiences, they usually get lots of engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is only a delicate variation on, or mixture of, current emotions, getting super-specific about these emotions helps us mirror and join with different folks. “These are doubtlessly alerts that inform us about our place on the earth,” she says.
