Don’t scoff: Researchers say more and more terms for these “neo-emotions” are showing up online, describing new dimensions and aspects of feeling. Velvetmist was a key example in a journal article about the phenomenon published in July 2025. But most neo-emotions aren’t the inventions of emo artificial intelligences. Humans come up with them, and they’re part of a big change in the way researchers are thinking about feelings, one that emphasizes how people continuously spin out new ones in response to a changing world.
Velvetmist might’ve been a chatbot one-off, but it’s not unique. The sociologist Marci Cottingham—whose 2024 paper got this vein of neo-emotion research started—cites many more new terms in circulation. There’s “Black joy” (Black people celebrating embodied pleasure as a form of political resistance), “trans euphoria” (the joy of having one’s gender identity affirmed and celebrated), “eco-anxiety” (the hovering fear of climate disaster), “hypernormalization” (the surreal pressure to continue performing mundane life and labor under capitalism during a global pandemic or fascist takeover), and the sense of “doom” found in “doomer” (one who is relentlessly pessimistic) or “doomscrolling” (being glued to an endless feed of bad news in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread).
Of course, emotional vocabulary is always evolving. During the Civil War, doctors used the centuries-old term “nostalgia,” combining the Greek words for “returning home”and “pain,” to describe a sometimes fatal set of symptoms suffered by soldiers—a condition we’d probably describe today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Now nostalgia’s meaning has mellowed and faded to a gentle affection for an old cultural product or vanished way of life. And people constantly import emotion words from other cultures when they’re convenient or evocative—like hygge (the Danish word for friendly coziness) or kvell (a Yiddish term for brimming over with happy pride).
Cottingham believes that neo-emotions are proliferating as people spend more of their lives online. These coinages help us relate to one another and make sense of our experiences, and they get a lot of engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is just a subtle variation on, or combination of, existing feelings, getting super-specific about those feelings helps us reflect and connect with other people. “These are potentially signals that tell us about our place in the world,” she says.
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