The article explores the emerging phenomenon of “neo-emotions,” newly coined terms that describe subtle or previously unnamed emotional states, and how they are reshaping both personal experience and emotion science. It opens with “velvetmist,” a chatbot-generated label for a “complex and subtle emotion that elicits feelings of comfort, serenity, and a gentle sense of floating,” the kind of sensation that might arise during a sunset or while listening to a moody, low-key album. Although velvetmist originated from a Reddit user’s prompt to an artificial intelligence system, researchers say it is just one example within a broader wave of fresh emotional vocabulary spreading online.
Sociologist Marci Cottingham, whose 2024 paper helped launch this line of research, points to a growing roster of neo-emotions that capture people’s lived experiences with new precision. These include “Black joy,” defined as 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, and “hypernormalization,” the surreal pressure to keep performing ordinary life and labor under capitalism during events like a global pandemic or fascist takeover. The article also connects these new coinages to older shifts in emotional language, such as how “nostalgia” once described a sometimes fatal condition in Civil War soldiers but now refers to gentle affection for past culture or ways of life, and how terms like hygge and kvell have been borrowed from other cultures for their evocative power.
The rise of neo-emotions is linked to people spending more of their lives online, where highly specific feeling-words travel quickly and attract engagement, helping users relate and find their place in the world. This trend feeds into a larger paradigm shift in emotion science led by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research using tools like advanced brain imaging and observations of babies and people in relatively isolated cultures challenges the old idea of a universal set of basic emotions. She argues that what counts as anger, sadness, or fear is taught and culturally constructed, a view Cottingham echoes by describing emotions as “created” tools that people deploy to navigate social life. While some labels, like Barrett’s playful suggestion of “chiplessness” for the mixed sensations at the bottom of a snack bag, may be novelties, others such as eco-anxiety and Black joy can galvanize social movements.
Beyond their sociological significance, neo-emotions may have concrete benefits for individual well-being. Research on “emotional granularity,” or the ability to name emotions in detailed and specific ways, suggests that people who can distinguish among many nuanced feelings tend to fare better in both mental and physical health. According to the article, people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, spend fewer days hospitalized for illness, and are less likely to drink when stressed, drive recklessly, or smoke cigarettes. Scholars liken “emodiversity” to biodiversity or cultural diversity, proposing that a richer emotional vocabulary makes for a more resilient and enriched inner life. The piece closes by inviting readers to imagine a future shaped by these new feeling-words and to consider whether they might already have experienced velvetmist without having a name for it.
