Why inventing new emotions feels so good

Don’t scoff: Researchers say more and more terms for these “new emotions” are appearing online, describing new dimensions and aspects of feelings. Velvetmist was a prime example in a newspaper article about this phenomenon published in July 2025. But most of the new emotes are not inventions of emo AI. Created by humans, they are part of a major change in the way researchers think about emotions, a change that emphasizes how people are constantly creating new emotions in response to a changing world.

Velvetmist may have been a one-off chatbot, but it’s not unique. Sociologist Marcy Cottingham—whose 2024 paper kicked off this trend of new emotions research—cites several new terms floating around. There is “black joy” (black celebration of embodied pleasure as a form of political resistance), “trans ecstasy” (the joy of affirming and celebrating one’s gender identity), “eco-anxiety” (fear of climate catastrophe), “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 “the doomed” (one who is relentlessly pessimistic) or “the end.” Pessimism (clinging to an endless wave of bad news in a state of stagnation that combines apathy and dread).

Of course, emotional vocabulary is always evolving. During the Civil War, doctors used the term “nostalgia” for centuries, combining the Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” to describe a set of sometimes fatal symptoms experienced by soldiers — a condition we might today call post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, the meaning of nostalgia has faded and faded into a gentle affection for an old cultural product or a vanished way of life. People constantly import emotional words from other cultures when they are comforting or evocative He will come (Danish word for friendly rest) or kvell (Yiddish term meaning full of happy pride.)

Cottingham believes new emotions are proliferating as people spend most of their lives online. These currencies help us connect with each other and understand our experiences, and they also get great engagement on social media. So, even when new emotions are just a slight variation on or combination of existing emotions, accurately identifying these emotions helps us think and relate to others. “These are potentially signals that tell us about our place in the world,” she says.