Don't laugh: Researchers say more and more terms for these “neo-emotions” are popping up online, describing new dimensions and aspects of feeling. Velvet Mist was key example in a journal article about the phenomenon published in July 2025. But most neo-emotions are not inventions of emo artificial intelligence. They were invented by humans, and they are part of a larger shift in the way researchers think about feelings, one that highlights how people are constantly creating new ones in response to a changing world.
Velvetmist may be the only chatbot out there, but it's not unique. Sociologist Marcy Cottingham, whose 2024 paper laid the foundation for the study of neo-emotions – gives many more new terms in circulation. There is “black joy” (black people celebrating embodied pleasure as a form of political resistance), “transeuphoria” (the joy of affirming and celebrating one's gender identity), “ecoanxiety” (the looming fear of climate catastrophe), “hypernormalization” (the surreal pressure to continue mundane life and labor under capitalism during a global pandemic or fascist takeover), and the sense of “doom” found in the “doomed” (one who is relentlessly pessimistic) or “scrolling fate” (glued to an endless stream of bad news in an immobilized state that combines apathy and fear).
Of course, the emotional vocabulary is constantly evolving. During the Civil War, doctors used the centuries-old term “nostalgia,” combining the Greek words for “coming home” and “pain” to describe the sometimes lethal array of symptoms that soldiers suffered—a condition we would probably describe today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Now the meaning of nostalgia has softened into an affectionate attachment to an old cultural product or a vanished way of life. And people import words of emotion from other cultures all the time when it is convenient or evocative, e.g. hygge (Danish word for friendly coziness) or evening (Yiddish term for complete happy pride).
Cottingham believes neo-emotions are spreading as people spend more of their lives online. These coins help us communicate with each other and make sense of our experiences, and they attract a lot of attention on social media. Thus, even when a neo-emotion is just a subtle variation or combination of existing feelings, receiving hyper-specific information about those feelings helps us think about and communicate with other people. “These are potentially signals that tell us about our place in the world,” she says.
