Don’t scoff: Researchers say increasingly more phrases for these “neo-feelings” are displaying up on-line, describing new dimensions and facets 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 with emotions, one which emphasizes how individuals repeatedly spin out new ones in response to a altering world.
Velvetmist would possibly’ve been a chatbot one-off, nevertheless it’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 individuals 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 strain to proceed performing mundane life and labor beneath 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 infinite feed of unhealthy information in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
In fact, emotional vocabulary is all the time evolving. Throughout the Civil Conflict, medical doctors used the centuries-old time period “nostalgia,” combining the Greek phrases for “returning dwelling”and “ache,” to explain a generally deadly set of signs suffered by troopers—a situation we’d most likely describe right this moment as post-traumatic stress dysfunction. Now nostalgia’s that means has mellowed and pale to a mild affection for an outdated cultural product or vanished lifestyle. And other people continually 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 glad satisfaction).
Cottingham believes that neo-feelings are proliferating as individuals 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 delicate variation on, or mixture of, present emotions, getting super-specific about these emotions helps us mirror and join with different individuals. “These are doubtlessly alerts that inform us about our place on this planet,” she says.
