Don’t scoff: Researchers say increasingly more phrases for these “neo-feelings” are displaying up on-line, describing new dimensions and points 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 way in which researchers are occupied with 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, 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 identification 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 limitless feed of dangerous information in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
In fact, emotional vocabulary is all the time evolving. Throughout the Civil Struggle, 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 at present 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 continuously 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 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 numerous engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is only a refined variation on, or mixture of, current emotions, getting super-specific about these emotions helps us replicate and join with different folks. “These are probably alerts that inform us about our place on the earth,” she says.