Don’t scoff: Researchers say an increasing number of phrases for these “neo-feelings” are displaying up on-line, describing new dimensions and elements 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 give you them, they usually’re a part of a giant change in the best way researchers are fascinated about emotions, one which emphasizes how folks repeatedly 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 bought 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 beneath 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 limitless feed of unhealthy information in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
After all, emotional vocabulary is at all times evolving. Through the Civil Conflict, docs used the centuries-old time period “nostalgia,” combining the Greek phrases for “returning residence”and “ache,” to explain a typically deadly set of signs suffered by troopers—a situation we’d in all probability describe right this moment as post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Now nostalgia’s that means has mellowed and pale to a delicate affection for an previous cultural product or vanished lifestyle. And other people consistently 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 joyful delight).
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 quite a lot of engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is only a refined variation on, or mixture of, present emotions, getting super-specific about these emotions helps us mirror and join with different folks. “These are doubtlessly indicators that inform us about our place on this planet,” she says.
