Why coming up with new emotions feels so good

Don’t be alarmed: Researchers say more and more terms for these ‘neo-emotions’ are popping up online, describing new dimensions and aspects of feelings. Velvet Mist was one key example in a magazine article about the phenomenon published in July 2025. But most neo-emotions are not the inventions of emo artificial intelligences. People make them up, and they’re part of a major change in the way researchers think about feelings, a change that highlights how people are constantly making up new feelings in response to a changing world.

Velvetmist may have been a one-off chatbot, but it’s not unique. The sociologist Marci Cottingham – from whom 2024 paper has started this vein of neo-emotion research – citing many more new terms in circulation. There is “black joy” (black people celebrating embodied pleasure as a form of political resistance), “trans-euphoria” (the joy when one’s gender identity is affirmed and celebrated), “eco-anxiety” (the floating fear of climate catastrophe), “hypernormalization” (the surreal pressure to continue everyday life and work under capitalism during a global pandemic or fascist takeover), and the sense of “doom” found in “doomer” (someone who is ruthless). pessimistic) or ‘doomscrolling’ (being glued to an endless stream of bad news in an immobilized state that combines apathy and fear).

Of course, emotional vocabulary is always evolving. During the Civil War, doctors used the age-old term “nostalgia,” a combination of the Greek words for “return home” and “pain,” to describe a sometimes fatal set of symptoms suffered by soldiers – a condition we would probably describe today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the meaning of nostalgia has softened and faded into a gentle affection for an old cultural product or a vanished way of life. And people import emotional words from other cultures all the time when they are convenient or evocative hygge (the Danish word for friendly conviviality) or evening (a Yiddish term for overflowing with happy pride).

Cottingham believes new emotions will increase as people spend more of their lives online. These coins help us relate to each other and understand our experiences, and they drive a lot of engagement on social media. So even if a neo-emotion is just a subtle variation on, or combination of, existing feelings, making those feelings super specific helps us reflect and connect with other people. “These are potentially signals that tell us about our place in the world,” she says.