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Abstract

Emotion research that attends to the cultural dynamics of affective life remains underdeveloped. I outline an agenda for an understudied phenomenon that can orient emotion researchers to the situated, cultural practices of affective life: Neo-emotions. Neo-emotions, when situated within macro-level processes and cultural events, illustrate the constrained yet creative practices that social actors use to address the disconnect between one's emotional vocabulary and dynamic environment. As such, neo-emotions are analytically rich cultural practices that can be empirically explored through sociological, anthropological, historical, and psychological inquiry. I discuss a range of neo-emotions, including doomscrolling, eco-grief, and Black joy, their social antecedents (digitalization, disasters/crises, and social movements) and methodological implications for an interdisciplinary agenda.

Keywords

neo-emotions emotion practices emotional capital digitalization disasters social movements

Emotion research has been mired in a quest for universal and fixed truths. The basic theory of emotion (Ekman, 1992) and efforts to analytically separate biophysiological and sociocultural influences are now heavily debated, as biophysiological processes are already caught up in and a product of sociocultural processes and vice versa.¹ Separating out the biophysical and sociocultural risks further distorting the topic under consideration, without elucidating the “experiences of emotional beings” (Mun, 2021, p. xxii) or how “emotions are constructed dynamically between people, as opposed to merely inside the head a of single individual” (Lindquist and MacCormack, 2014, p. 134)—aims that are at the core of emotion research. With these critiques, there is renewed discussion of the field's fixed taxonomies and the quest to find universal emotions. Scarantino (2012, p. 362) goes so far as to say that we should “give up on the assumption that a good theory of emotion/anger/fear/etcetera should apply to all emotions/all angers/all fears/etcetera.” In the spirit of Scarantino's call for pluralism, I outline an interdisciplinary agenda that centers dynamic cultural practices over static taxonomies: the study of neo-emotions.

If, during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, you found yourself scrolling through social media posts, reading news articles, and checking disease-tracking dashboards, all while feeling a mix of unease, anxiety, and/or distress, then you might find resonance with the term doomscrolling—a term that has transitioned from urban dictionary to Wikipedia² and WebMD³ since the start of the pandemic and is being closely watched by Merriam-Webster.⁴ During the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, you might have witnessed or experienced Black joy—a term used to signify the practice and feelings of sustained community joy and resilience in the face of racism, suffering, and death.⁵ Or, in confronting news of lost arctic ice or the activism of Extinction Rebellion, perhaps you felt what communities are calling eco-grief or terrafurie (Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021). Each of these terms—doomscrolling, Black joy, and eco-grief—are examples of neologisms that I term neo-emotions.⁶ Despite their relevance to people's responses to everything from climate change to pandemics and racial injustice, the emergence, use, effects, and patterns of neo-emotions have been overlooked by emotion researchers.

Following a review of the drive to find a universal taxonomy in sociology and psychology (a drive that has rendered neo-emotions illegible to emotion scholars), I define and conceptualize neo-emotions as cultural practices that expand established lexicons and can defy interior/exterior and static/dynamic dualities. Neo-emotions, situated within macro-level change and salient cultural events, are the constrained yet creative practices that social actors use to address the disconnect between one's emotional vocabulary (Gordon, 1981; Thoits, 2004; as one element of emotional capital, Cottingham, 2016) and the situations they encounter. As creative practices that address the structured yet dynamic elements of social life, neo-emotions are analytically rich objects of study. I outline an agenda for researching neo-emotions by highlighting a set of core questions and the distinct contributions that different disciplines (sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology) can make for understanding this phenomenon. Neo-emotions are certainly not new in an historical sense. As Scheer writes, “new words emerge for new emotions all the time” (2012, p. 214). But they may be increasing in number, changing forms, and presenting new opportunities for the study of emotion as a dynamic and context-bound cultural practice.

The Drive for a Universal Taxonomy

Influential branches in psychology and sociology have focused on a research agenda that strives for a universal and fixed taxonomy of discrete emotions. The first question that Stets and Turner, in their 2006 Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, pose is “how many emotions are there?” (Stets & Turner, 2006, p. 1). Such a simple but sweeping question should give us pause, as it is packed with assumptions about the universal, fixed, and discrete nature of emotional experiences and labeling practices, along with an assumption that academic knowledge, in the form of taxonomies, is produced outside the very social forces that shape emotions. With this focus on universality, a drive to taxonomize has followed, as Thamm's (2006) “The Classification of Emotions” is the starting point for Stets and Tuner's handbook. The link between scientism's quest for universal, fixed truth and the development of the sociology of emotions is especially clear in Thamm's proposal of a “Linnaean-like classification scheme” (p. 11) of emotions that mimics the natural sciences.

Branches of sociological work have taken Ekman’s (1992) claims on the universality of basic emotions as settled—as Turner and Stets wrote in 2005 (p. 3), “there is too much evidence supporting the universality of many emotions and their expression across cultures to sustain the claim that all emotions are socially constructed.” Edited volumes in sociology continue to orient themselves around supposedly basic and secondary emotions. For example, Jacobsen's (2022) Emotions in Culture and Everyday Life is organized around the usual suspects, taking one discrete emotion after another in isolation: Love, Pride, Shame, Fear, Sadness. Only the concluding chapter on ambivalence begins to push against these neat categorizations. More recently, Stets has argued that much can be gained from examining “the rich array of emotions that individuals experience” (2010, p. 265) and Turner notes that little sociological work has mapped out “the full palate of emotions” (2009, p. 343). Beyond sociology, Ekman's basic theory has been the subject of sustained methodological critiques (Barrett, 2017; Mesquita, 2022). His influential work on faces posits that facial expressions can be linked to precise emotions. But faces isolated from both bodies and social context are more artifacts of psychological methods than indicative of how social actors come to understand their own and others’ emotions in context (Barrett, 2017; Mesquita et al., 2017). Methodological protocols that give subjects predetermined emotion terms to choose from, far from showing the universality of basic emotions, can indicate how researchers, perhaps unintentionally, bring their own cultural and social experiences into the research enterprise, even when trying to study phenomena supposedly untouched by culture (Barrett, 2017; Mesquita, 2022).

The drive to find basic and universal emotions has rendered emotion practices that defy, blend, or operate outside of a fixed taxonomy illegible. Privileging the diverse emotional vocabularies of groups and subcultures promises to move us beyond a fixed taxonomy mindset (Miles, 2023). Jackson et al. (2019) point to language as a useful site for bettering our understanding of cultural variability in emotional experiences. Neo-emotions are practices of identifying, naming, and sharing new feelings of relative (mis)alignment with one's environment that do not correspond with established emotion words. I conceptualize neo-emotions as cultural practices that blur individual/collective, static/dynamic, and interior/exterior dualisms that have plagued theories of emotion, including theories “which reify emotion as an attribute of individuals or their actions” (Emirbayer & Goldberg, 2005, p. 471).

Defining and Conceptualizing Neo-Emotions

In her groundbreaking work, The Managed Heart, Hochschild (1983) offered her own taxonomy of emotions, but was also attentive to the culturally divergent processes of naming emotions: “In comparing namable feelings to [un]named ones we can garner clues to the links between larger social arrangements and common ways of seeing and feeling” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 239). She titles this section “Named and Unnamed Ways of Seeing,” and recounts specific emotions in languages like Czech and Yiddish that do not have satisfactory counterparts in English. She briefly attends to culture, language, and historical moments by identifying the link between social trends and new emotion terminology, taking up examples of new emotion terms that developed out of the counter-culture movements of 1960s America. Writing in the 1980s, some of the terms she highlights remain legible even to this Millennial (terms like being “freaked out,” “having one's mind blown,” and “psycho-babble”). Though some neo-emotions certainly fall in and out of fashion, they provide a rich snapshot of the time period and cultural context that produced them. Neo-emotions, like time capsules, transport us in ways that few single terms can.

All emotions are culturally informed practices of embodying, naming, and/or expressing feelings of relative (mis)alignment with one's environment (Cottingham, 2016). Although researchers have created a number of emotion classification schemes, these taxonomies—and the fixed taxonomy mindset underlying them—fail to address how emotion practices include multiple (Bericat, 2016), ambivalent (Rothman et al., 2017), ambiguous (Burkitt, 2012), and novel feelings. Instead of seeing emotions as final products categorizable in a fixed classification scheme, a research agenda on neo-emotions centers the “thinking-feeling” processes in which cognition and emotion are folded in on each other to “permeate our action and awareness” (Jasper, 2018, p. xi).

Environments are not static, but dynamic—with the potential to shift at micro, meso, and macro levels. Sociologists studying emotion have focused on how social changes influence emotional expression and norms (Cancian & Gordon, 1988; Peterson, 2006), overlooking the potential for emergent neo-emotions. Environmental change can include everything from an individual's physical movement between home and work settings (when emotional spillover occurs, Cottingham et al., 2020), shifts over time in organizational cultures (Sawyer & Clair, 2021), and the crossing of international borders (Nichols & Campbell, 2010), to more sweeping, macro-level changes in the earth's climate, emergent disasters and crises, trends in digitalization, the global spread of capitalism, and the influence and successes of human rights and social justice movements (including feminist, queer, anti-racist, post-colonial, and environmental movements). Developed closely with the symbolic interactionist tradition (Hochschild, 1979; Shott, 1979), much of the early sociological scholarship on emotions attended to the micro-level (Collins, 1981) and the self-society nexus that produces emotions and the self.⁷ More recent theorizing in social movements has turned to concepts from practice theory (Gould, 2009) and focused on process (Jasper, 2018), bridging the micro and macro divide within the field.

Related to both macro and micro-levels, neo-emotions are emotion-specific cultural practices aimed at capturing a distinct affective experience of relative (mis)alignment with one's dynamic environment. Their emergence indicates a discrepancy between the emotion vocabulary one has, the situations one confronts, and the embodied feelings/affect one experiences. In other words, neo-emotions indicate a discrepancy in the resonance between affect and established emotion words and a social practice of constructing new terms, and with them, emotions. Neo-emotions signify an expansion of established emotion lexicons and resistance to established feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979) as epistemic authorities.⁸ As philosopher Glenn Albrecht writes, in defending his own long career creating neologisms and neo-emotions:
A neologism was needed to indicate a complex yet distinct human emotion that was being experienced by people in circumstances where they were confronting a changing and distressed environment, one that they loved. It was this set of circumstances that was not previously given adequate recognition in the English language. The feeling of psychic distress caused by negative environmental change deserved a word of its own (Albrecht, 2020, p. 10).

Neologisms are new words created “in response to new phenomena or fashions. Regardless of whether neologisms are transient or persistent, they represent creative expressions of emerging or changing representations that are exchanged amongst certain groups of people” (Becken et al., 2021, p. 1,451). While Albrecht, Becken, and colleagues discuss neologisms generally, it is fruitful to zoom in specifically on the emergence of new emotion terms as a subset of neologisms.

Neo-emotions are more than the sum of their parts, though they might share a family resemblance to established emotions and involve a combination of other emotions, they are nonetheless distinct. An ingredient-like approach to emotions (even established emotions, like contempt as a combination of anger and disgust, for example) no longer makes sense in light of social constructionist critiques because it assumes that the combined emotions are less basic and primary than the ones that are used to produce them, and similarly assumes that emotions identified as “basic” could not, themselves, be dissected into more fundamental components (Ortony & Turner, 1990).⁹ Moreover, if the primacy of certain emotions were valid, why would new words be needed? Why not simply say, “I feel angry and disgusted”? If it was purely an issue of linguistic efficiency, how do we make sense of examples of “talking, feeling, thinking” our way through difficult-to-process encounters, times when many words are needed for individuals to make sense of their emotional lives (see Cottingham & Erickson, 2020)? More still, words like “nostalgia” and “schadenfreude” are nearly as cumbersome as the more simplistic, “longing for the past” or “delight in another's suffering.” Their newness means they risk being misunderstood across situations and groups, and yet it is their novelty that makes them enticing as cultural practices to pick up and use, either to name the emotion as a shared/collective feeling or to set oneself apart by use of a resource that signals membership in an exclusive group or as an emotion entrepreneur (as a form of distinction, discussed more below, Bourdieu, 1996; Holthaus, 2022).

Historians can offer a vital perspective on how neo-emotions have emerged, evolved, and possibly faded over time. Scheer builds on Reddy's notion of “emotives” to argue that “Putting a name on our feelings is part and parcel of experiencing them” (Scheer, 2012, p. 212). The term “emotives” refers to the “powerful effects that emotional utterances can have on emotions” (Reddy 2000:116) as the naming of emotions can lead to self-exploration and self-altering effects. As he writes, “the value of any emotionally expressive ritual or practice lies not just in its ‘giving form’ to our feelings but also in the way it is capable, with frequent but not predictable success, of eliciting them and managing them” (Reddy 2000, p. 152). More recently, Dodman's (2018) look at nostalgia notes that the emotion was once a pathological diagnosis that would later fall out of diagnostic classifications among physicians. Indeed, research on neo-emotions might find that the emergence of new terms overlaps with changes in medical practices and shifting diagnostic labels and schemas. While historians can offer retrospective analyses (Frevert et al., 2014), sociologists and anthropologists can examine neo-emotions when the impact and the fate is still unknown or even offer predictions about the “stickiness” (Ahmed, 2004) and portability of particular neo-emotions—the extent to which they will be used and remain useful over time and across divergent contexts. While the emergence of neo-emotions is not exclusive to the 20th or 21st centuries, they might be increasing in number and dispersion. Parallel with a rise in affectivism (Dukes et al., 2021)—the increasingly consolidated field of affective science that sees emotions as critical drivers of human behavior—might be a cultural rise in neo-emotions that extend taken-for-granted emotional lexicons.

Taking neo-emotions and the emergent and dynamic nature of cultural practices seriously renders questions like, “how many emotions are there?” (Turner & Stets, 2005, p. 1) too limiting. We might ask instead, what neo-emotions emerge during particular time periods within a particular society? Who creates them? What influences their popularity among certain groups? How do neo-emotions relate to processes of digitalization, the uncertainty of crises, disasters, political and economic events, or the impact of social activism? As I detail in the next section, in an emotion practice approach, the world out there (social field) is fractured rather than monolithic and is simultaneously shaping and being shaped by how it has been internalized by social actors (as habitus). To set a fixed answer to the question “how many emotions are there” is to ignore the dynamics of social life, cross-cultural variability, and the generative potential of social actors. In looking only for what is fixed and settled, we have overlooked what is new and emergent. Below I turn to what an emotion practice approach, situated in sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's poststructural theory, can offer for conceptualizing neo-emotions.

Neo-Emotions as Cultural Practices

Research in sociology, history, and anthropology builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1986, 1990) to see emotion as a form of social practice (Cottingham, 2022; Erickson & Stacey, 2013; Scheer, 2012; Seremetakis, 1991). Emotions are seen as embodied enactments¹⁰—the body sensing and trying to make sense of the world—and linked to cultural capital—differentially valued cultural objects, knowledge, preferences, styles, and tastes (Bourdieu, 1986). In his quest to overcome dualisms of mind/body, objective/subjective, and the phenomenological and materialist strands of European social theory, Bourdieu offers his own set of neologisms for understanding the social world, namely, forms of capital (economic, social, and cultural), habitus, and field. As Swartz summarizes, Bourdieu's framing of social life emphasizes the reproduction of social hierarchies through cultural processes:
“all cultural symbols and practices, from artistic tastes, style in dress, and eating habits to religion, science and philosophy even language itself—embody interests and function to enhance social distinctions. The struggle for social distinction, whatever its symbolic form, is for Bourdieu a fundamental dimension of all social life” (Swartz, 1997, p. 6).

More recently, emotion scholars (Froyum, 2010; Gillies, 2006; Heaney, 2019; Virkki, 2007), building on feminist theories that reframe emotions as both skills and epistemic resources (Jaggar, 1989; Lutz, 2002), have further delineated cultural capital to incorporate emotions as embodied cultural capital, or emotional capital. This refers to the “trans-situational, emotion-based knowledge, emotion management skills, and feeling capacities, which are both socially emergent and critical to the maintenance of power” (Cottingham, 2016, p. 454). The link between emotions and power is particularly indebted to feminist theory, as it attends to “the material, institutional and cultural capillaries of power through which discourses of emotion operate” (Lutz, 2002, p. 104).

The concept of emotional capital shares similarities to Barrett's (2017) notion of emotional granularity, with the important caveat that emotional capital is meant to draw attention to the unequal distribution of emotion-based knowledge (emotion words being part of that knowledge) and feeling rules—situationally specific expectations for what and how to feel (Hochschild, 1979)—that are shaped by social locations across class, race, gender, and other axes of inequality. Emotional granularity calls attention to differences in expertise in naming feelings with emotion words (Barrett, 2017, p. 180), but does not situate these levels of expertise in historical and ongoing forms of social inequality. For example, research on children's vocabularies finds that working-class children of all races are exposed to and appear to acquire fewer total words than their middle-class counterparts during critical points in early childhood development (Bernstein, 1971; Farkas & Beron, 2004). Emotional capital, in an emotion practice framework, uses the capital label similar to economic capital, as a means of drawing attention to how emotions, emotional words, and emotion displays are social products and resources, unequally distributed in society and linked to the maintenance of that inequality (Froyum, 2010). Both an expansive emotional vocabulary and honed skills in its appropriate application become markers of class distinction that are then used to justify exclusion. Even if a working-class kid were to invest in expanding their emotional vocabulary and application techniques (developing more emotional granularity), this does not mean it will ever appear as “natural” or be applied with the same level of ease as their middle-class counterparts, nor does it guarantee that some other marker of class distinction won’t give away one's class position and where one falls in the social pecking order.

In a social practice framework, there is never a perfect match between affect—a “felt but amorphous and uncategorized affective state”—and an emotion label (Gould, 2009, p. 38) that is used to interpret affect. Even when established emotion words are used to capture a feeling, aspects of affect can remain as an uninterpretable force. The emergence of a neo-emotion suggests that prior established emotional vocabularies (Gordon, 1981), as part of emotional capital and habitus (Cottingham, 2016; Gould, 2009), are no longer sufficient to interpret a particular affective intensity.¹¹ In the incongruence between pre-established emotion terms and experiences with the world, social actors reconfigure emotion terms, combining, inventing or subverting them, and, in a constructionist approach, bring into the world new emotions. Individuals who create neo-emotion terms might be framed as emotion entrepreneurs because of their “reflexive practice of giving names to emotions to turn them into ontological entities” and their “linguistic and epistemic innovation” (Holthaus, 2022, p. 3) can amount to a novel “pedagogy of feeling” (Gould, 2009, p. 69). But to be innovative, their naming must be received as valued and meaningful, usually building on the entrepreneur's status, authority, and access to cultural capital (scientific or artistic standing that gives them cache, see Holthaus, 2022) as well as the shared conditions among a broader group that render their innovations persuasive.

In creating a neo-emotion, sharing that term, and seeing traction in that term's wider usage, these creative acts reverberate out to others (most likely others of a shared social location or subculture), helping to make sense out of similar incongruences between vocabulary and experience. In sharing new terms with others, and these terms being received as meaningful, this generative process also creates feelings of shared experience and with it, emotional energy (communicative practices as forms of mediated co-presence, Collins, 2004). Yet this is, in thinking along the lines of an emotion practice approach (Cottingham, 2022), a process steeped in social inequalities and dynamics of power, as neo-emotions might translate into new forms of social and cultural capital, themselves mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Understanding these processes and the conditions that shape them is key to a research agenda on neo-emotions.

Bourdieu's work has been criticized for undertheorizing change and agency (Jenkins, 1982). In becoming habituated to social conditions, habitus is an internal reflection of external realities that cannot change unless those external realities are changed. This leaves little room for social actors to, themselves, change the conditions they encounter and, in the process, change themselves. Seeing social action as fully determined, though, might be a result of privileging established, etic emotion terms and sense-making above emic, or lay person, understandings. Additionally, much of the cutting-edge emotion research that grapples with social change is not in emotion journals, but in journals focused on digitalization and new forms of media and social movements studies (see Davis et al., 2018; Döveling et al., 2018; Persaud & Crawley, 2022) as these fields connect to the macro-level processes of digitalization and social justice movements, some of the macro-level processes I take up below.

Situating Neo-Emotions in Macro-Level Change and Cultural Events

Having defined neo-emotions and conceptualized them within an emotion practice approach, I now turn to the broader sociological trends that might shape their emergence and the types of questions a neo-emotion agenda should address. Neo-emotions, I argue, emerge from the confluence of broader, macro-level societal changes now endemic to the twenty-first century, including digitalization, the global spread of capitalism, disasters and crises, and the successes and setbacks of queer, feminist, antiracist, and climate activism. In addition to the broad question of what neo-emotions emerge during particular time periods within a particular society, macro-level processes can structure (though not determine) their emergence. The rapid rise in digitalization (both a product and driver of the spread of global capitalism) and social media over the last 30 years has (1) increased the number (and possible diversity) of mediated social interactants available to an individual, (2) created spaces for anonymous and anomic play and experimentation, and (3) appears to reward word-play and experimentation with likes and shares. In other words, social media technologies (SMTs) have “relational properties […] that are likely to induce an emotional state or emotion-related behavior” (Steinert & Dennis, 2022, p. 12). One such emotion-related behavior is the creation of neo-emotions (Dolin et al., 2021).

Importantly, digitalization and the rise of SMTs are not the sole contributors to the creation of neo-emotions, though they may provide conditions that catalyze more or different forms and facilitate their spread. Aided by SMTs, charismatic leaders can proliferate and amplify certain neo-emotions (see Trump's use of “haterade,” Holubnycha et al. 2020:48–49). Crises and disasters also appear to spur their emergence, as Albrecht (2019) documents the many varieties of grief, distress, and sadness connected with climate change and the sense of impending loss that have been developed since as far back as the 1940s. A number of neologisms (“Zoom-bombing,” “covidiots”), and neo-emotions (“blursday,” “doomscrolling,” “brain fog”) emerged or gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic as reactions to the uncertainty and distress of that event (Asif et al., 2021; Nabila & Abdulrahman, 2021). These developments raise important empirical questions about neo-emotions that could be taken up in future research: Were these neo-emotions more numerous, more durable, or of wider usage than other neo-emotions used in other crises? Do some endure to become part of an established lexicon? What does the endurance of some neo-emotions over others suggest about broader social changes?

Additional questions for the study of neo-emotions should interrogate what these emotions do in terms of individual and collective experiences and behavior. The use of neo-emotions likely has a twin function: In sharing a term (and with that an understanding of the world and one's relationship to it), not only is an experience named, but a powerful sense of shared humanity is reaffirmed, even if only briefly. This provides a social explanation for why affective labeling (rating or categorizing a feeling as a particular emotion) can itself reduce distress and regulate emotion (Torre & Lieberman, 2018). Further questions emerge: Do neo-emotions facilitate self-reflection (or reflexivity, Holmes, 2010) that can lead to behavioral change? For example, do social media users familiar with the term “doomscrolling”—the “endless scroll[ing] through social media in a desperate search for clarity”¹²—recognize the futile nature of the practice and, as a result, regulate their social media habits more effectively? The potential for these types of beneficial effects has not been explored in discussions of SMT use and emotional wellbeing.

At the political level, an analysis of neo-emotions should assess the role that neo-emotions play in maintaining or challenging political power and social solidarity (Jasper, 2018; Wettergren, 2009). Building on the finding that naming distressing feelings can make them less distressing (Torre & Lieberman, 2018), organizers and activists in social movements might be able to avoid exhaustion and burnout, and continue organizing for social change with the strategic use of particular neo-emotions. Additionally, neo-emotions might serve as an emotional hook to draw in new members to social movements, as scholars have noted the role that narratives and master frames play in activists’ efforts to appeal to wider audiences (Polletta et al., 2011). The relative successes and setbacks of gay rights activists, climate activism, and the Black Lives Matter movement might be analyzed in relation to the uses of different neo-emotions (such as solastalgia and Black joy discussed below). What is the relationship between neo-emotions (as products or ingredients for success) and the social movements that use them? To what extent do critical events (such as the climate strikes of Greta Thunberg or the murder of George Floyd in 2020) link to the increased use of neo-emotions by activists or the public? These questions situate neo-emotions within macro-level social change and salient cultural events.

Patterns in Neo-Emotion Practices

Some key neo-emotions can illustrate emerging patterns in their forms, the broader social processes they emerge from, and the use they have for social actors. Researchers often take epistemic authority in privileging their neo-emotions over lay constructions and we can envision projects that trace both the movement of expert terms into lay usage and the movement of lay terms into expert accounts. For example, “languishing” is a term that gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic through Adam Grant,¹³ in which he relays sociological work on measuring languishing as feelings of “emptiness and stagnation, constituting a life of quiet despair” (Keyes, 2002, p. 210). Notably, both Grant and Keyes define languishing as emotional, differing from a generic definition (“failing to make progress or be successful,” dictionary.com) that lacks an emotional connotation. In researching neo-emotions, new terms developed by psychologists and academics should be placed under the microscope, as researchers themselves are shaped by and contribute to the social worlds they inhabit.¹⁴ Indeed, there can be a sort of social echo chamber in which expert terms are developed, but in publicizing them heavily, academics performatively call into being (or at least inflate the supposed pervasiveness of) both the emotion terms themselves and a worldview centered on psychological introspection, often at the cost of collectively linking emotions to their social roots and collective solutions (see Carr's, 2022 critique of a mental health discourse that fails to address root causes).

A neo-emotion agenda should prioritize neo-emotions as organic practices that emerge from subcultures and folk understandings of the world. While each neo-emotion term might come and go, sustained study of their emergence, movement around social spheres (social media, news media, politics, etc.), and potential decline can provide insights into the interrelations of micro and macro changes, the emotional vocabularies of distinct groups, and the creative practices that appear to be catalyzed by the uptake of new media forms. If neo-emotions are more than mere fads (and, indeed, even fads are of considerable interest to social researchers, see Strang & Macy, 2001), then we should identify their emergence and use even while they remain novel. Below I delineate some tentative patterns in neo-emotion practices: (1) fusing feeling with source, (2) fusing different feelings, and (3) creating new feelings. I categorize all three practices as neo-emotions.

One emergent pattern among neo-emotions is the fusing of sources with feelings in ways that create new configurations of feeling. Black joy, doomscrolling, eco-grief, and flightshame all work to merge the source with feeling(s) either as an abbreviation, two words, hyphenated, or in combining them into a compound word. FoMO—short for “Fear of Missing Out” has received some sustained interest from psychologists and internet scholars (Buglass et al., 2017; Dogan, 2019; Hunt et al., 2018; Milyavskaya et al., 2018). It is an internet shorthand that links to the cultural practices of using abbreviations to aid in rapid typing. Emotes like “LOL” might also be used in both digital and nondigital interactions and be seen as a neo-emotion by some (Dolin et al., 2021). Doomscrolling was a term that predated the COVID-19 pandemic (I located an entry on the website Urban Dictionary as early as 2016), but has gained notable traction since the pandemic, including being the focus of a book by a clinician dedicated to pathologizing the practice (see West, 2020). Fusing feeling with source is undoubtedly a practice born from the constraints of character limits in digital environments and the need for quick typing, yet it also has important implications. These combinations resist interior/exterior dualities of Western thought and make it difficult to overlook a feeling's main catalyst. Fusing source and feeling might make a feeling less easily pathologized in isolation from context. These neo-emotions suggest that source is just as critical as the feeling itself for communicating meaning to the community.

In addition to fusing feeling and source, neo-emotion practices can involve the fusing of multiple, established emotions. Black joy appears to do both, fusing multiple emotions in connection with Black experiences. Black joy is not merely feeling joy because one is Black. As artist and activist Kleaver Cruz writes, “Black Joy is not … dismissing or creating an ‘alternate’ black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustice … in tension with the joy we experience.”¹⁵ In trying to hold together the tensions of pain and injustice, alongside joy and freedom in a single term, something much more than simple joy is being created here. The term's increased use coincides with the rise of SMTs and the influential role of online Black artists, intellectuals, and cultural taste-makers, sometimes collectively referred to as Black Twitter (Graham & Smith, 2016; Hill, 2018; Maragh, 2018). Social media has provided digital spaces for Black identity, meaning-making, and activism in the face of racism at multiple levels (structural and interpersonal). Black joy is a neo-emotion that pushes against conceptions of joy as superficial elation, devoid of histories of suffering and pain, while also pushing against reductions of Black life to pitiable suffering (Stewart, 2021). To flourish and work toward thriving in the midst of suffering is what makes this particular flavor of joy distinct. As Johnson writes, Black joy denotes “a real and imagined site of utopian possibility” and “allows us the space to stretch our imaginations beyond what we previously thought possible and allows us to theorize a world in which white supremacy does not dictate our everyday lives” (2015, p. 180). In using the neo-emotion of Black joy, writers and activists reaffirm Black humanity despite the inhumane conditions that continually exert and center violence against the community.

Albrecht's development of “solastalgia” also works to fuse multiple emotions. As an example of a more top-down, expert neo-emotion, solastalgia combines nostalgia, itself developed in the early 1600s as an intense yearning for home, and the “‘sol’ of solace and the ‘sol’ of desolation” (Albrecht, 2019, p. 38). Albrecht defines solostalgia as the pain and distress caused by “negative environmental change” (38) and details the term's spread among climate activists, in popular culture, among academics, and its alignment with the emotional turmoil of geographically dispersed and vulnerable groups, including the First Nations people of his native Australia and activists fighting mountaintop removal in Appalachia. Solastalgia is just one of many climate emotions that can include compassion, hope, anxiety, fear, and grief, the latter being at times reframed as “eco-grief” (Holthaus, 2022) that includes particular rituals, such as the memorial service held for the first melted glacier in northwest Europe, Okjökull in Iceland (Neckel & Hasenfratz, 2021).¹⁶

Neo-emotions can entail the labeling of a completely new feeling or set of feelings. Examples include compersion, brain fog, and psychic numbing. Compersion is conceptualized as the opposite of possessiveness and jealousy and as “a feeling of warmth, satisfaction, joy, or pleasure from knowing/imagining that your partner is emotionally or sexually involved with another person” (Mogilski et al., 2019, p. 1813). Predating “freudenfreude”¹⁷ and avoiding the critiques and debates of that term,¹⁸ compersion emerged in connection with polyamory and the social movements of the 1970s in which sexual, romantic, and family norms were increasingly challenged in academic work, activism, and praxis.¹⁹ Social workers, therapists, and sexuality scholars have researched the term's use in polyamorous communities (Deri, 2015; Sheff & Tesene, 2015). Yet few emotion scholars have taken compersion up as a subject of interest. Additional examples of neo-emotions that involve the labeling of new feelings include terms from John Koenig's (2021) Dictionary of Obscure Sorrow, such as “sonder” and “anemoia,” which first emerged as a part of his popular blog and can now be found in his published bestseller of the same name.²⁰

Researching Neo-Emotions

What types of methods would suit a research agenda focused on neo-emotions? Certainly, the specific research question guides the methods used. Classic methods in cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology that identify emic perspectives could help identify the perceptions, experiences, and emotional vocabularies of groups and communities that develop neo-emotions. These methods include ethnography (Holyfield, 1999; Lutz, 1998; Miles, 2023), interviewing members of subcultures (Lois, 2001), content analysis of cultural products (Altheide, 1987; Recuber, 2016), and using diary methods to elicit rich reflections on the variability of emotional experiences and expressions (Cottingham & Erickson, 2020; Kenten, 2010). Such methods can allow for open-ended exploration of the words, meanings, uses, and contexts that inform neo-emotions.

Taking processes of digitalization seriously would also mean turning to sources like Urban Dictionary, social media hashtags, and other cultural products as useful starting points for identifying neo-emotions and their use across platforms. Initial, exploratory investigations can be supplemented with tracing neo-emotions across platforms and formats, including social media, news media, song lyrics, and fictional entertainment, and into other social spheres, including politics, family life, school, and work contexts. Quantitative methods might be tailored to measure the uses and frequency of neo-emotions in different digital platforms. Network analyses that examine connections across actors and groups and how they might facilitate the spread of neo-emotions could follow this quantitative line of inquiry. Similarly, web-scraping tools could be used to document the proliferation of terms across platforms (Bail, 2014; Rogers & Robinson, 2014). Sentiment analysis techniques could be useful, but by focusing primarily on positive or negative polarity, their ability to identify slang terminology is limited (Liu et al., 2021).

Studying neo-emotions in laboratory settings or in social media interventions could make use of established techniques (Dickens & DeSteno, 2014; van Zyl et al., 2020) by introducing new emotion terms or priming the salience of terms already familiar to participants in controlled settings to determine if their introduction shapes physiological responses, behaviors, and attitudes in-person and online. The example earlier of doomscrolling could be amenable to laboratory investigation. How might knowing this term influence digital habits, attitudes, or levels of wellbeing over time? Experimental studies in controlled settings could provide new information about the relationship between neo-emotions, attitudes, and possible behavioral changes.

Methodologically, the study of neo-emotions requires diverse research teams. This is precisely the type of research agenda in which one's social position in terms of gender, race, socio-economic background, nationality, and sexuality can produce blind spots and unexamined assumptions (Collins, 1986)—issues best addressed by assembling diverse research teams to work together (Táíwò, 2021). Diversifying the scholarship with which one engages is also critical, as scholarship on digitalization, social movements, crises, and disasters might all be critical for understanding how, when, and why neo-emotions emerge and if/how they spread.

Conclusion

Neo-emotions are cultural practices emblematic of broader social changes in digitalization, social movements, and global capitalism. In expanding emotion lexicons, neo-emotions from marginalized and subcultural groups are especially overlooked in emotion research, which has prioritized the search for a fixed and universal taxonomy. Concepts from practice theory, including emotional capital, can help researchers theorize the paradoxes of change and stasis, the relationship between the collective and the individual, and exterior/interior dualities. There are certainly other neo-emotions in addition to the ones I briefly sketch here that could be fruitfully taken up by emotion researchers. Understanding their meaning and travel requires knowledge of particular groups, cultural practices, and digital/nondigital environments. In traveling, a neo-emotion enriches the emotional capital of others, becoming a new resource to identify otherwise inchoate feelings while fostering connection and solidarity with the one who coined the term and the communities who use it. In drawing boundaries around communities, though, neo-emotions can also be powerful resources for exclusion or cooptation. We overlook these creative and energizing practices to the detriment of the field of emotion research.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Becky Erickson and the Kenyon Faculty seminar members, Matt Suazo, Piers Brown, and Brenna Casey, for their generous feedback on prior drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Marci D. Cottingham

Notes

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Neo-emotions: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda

Abstract

Keywords

The Drive for a Universal Taxonomy

Defining and Conceptualizing Neo-Emotions

Neo-Emotions as Cultural Practices

Situating Neo-Emotions in Macro-Level Change and Cultural Events

Patterns in Neo-Emotion Practices

Researching Neo-Emotions

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References