Don’t scoff: Researchers say increasingly phrases for these “neo-feelings” are exhibiting 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 provide you with them, they usually’re a part of an enormous change in the way in which researchers are fascinated 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, nevertheless it’s not distinctive. The sociologist Marci Cottingham—whose 2024 paper received 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 worry of local weather catastrophe), “hypernormalization” (the surreal stress to proceed performing mundane life and labor underneath capitalism throughout a worldwide 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 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 most likely describe in the present day as post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Now nostalgia’s that means has mellowed and pale to a mild affection for an previous cultural product or vanished lifestyle. And other people consistently import emotion phrases from different cultures once 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 at least one one other and make sense of our experiences, they usually get a whole 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 probably alerts that inform us about our place on the planet,” she says.
