Abstract
Neo-emotions are invented terms that express emotional experiences that are novel or that have not previously been labeled. This article considers the utility of the concept of neo-emotions for the study of the past, exploring concepts of novelty and historical change within the history of emotions; the limits of emotion words for the study of emotional life; and the ways that neo-emotions point to the place of creativity and play in the development of new emotions. It suggests that the prominence of neo-emotions in the 21st century reflects current philosophical and scientific ideas about how emotions operate, which do not apply in all societies. Despite this, the concept of neo-emotions requires historians to look again at past emotional practices and the place of play in the development of new emotions.
When conducting the research for this article, I came across a blog post titled “Invent Your Own Emotion” on the webpage of The Conflict Management Academy. The latter provide mediation services, as well as coaching and training in conflict management. The post, written by Samantha Hardy (2025), proposed readers engage in an exercise inspired by the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions are Made (2017): they should invent their own emotions! Hardy explained that the larger a person's emotional vocabulary, the better they would be at recognizing emotion and explaining it to others. Inventing your own emotion was a useful exercise in expanding one's emotional intelligence. The remainder of the blog post consisted of a number of words that the Conflict Management Academy team had come up with. “Spillease” was the feeling of frustration and relief when a spillage occurs in your pristine car—frustration because of the mess and relief that you no longer had to maintain a high standard of cleanliness; “launthetic” was the “feeling of apathy” experienced when doing laundry. Barrett's own invented emotion was “chiplessness”—the emotion felt when you reach into a bag of potato chips to come out empty handed. This emotion involved not only disappointment, but relief, guilt, and hunger.
Hardy titles her post “inventing emotions,” but we might suggest that—in attempting to label familiar experiences—she and her colleagues were less inventing than naming. A similar experiment by a user of Reddit, the social media site, was more radical. Poster noahjeadie (2023) asked ChatGPT to invent a new emotion, to describe what it felt like, and how that experience could be activated. ChatGPT provided “velvetmist”—“a complex and subtle emotion that elicits feelings of comfort, serenity, and a gentle sense of floating.” It advised noahjeadie of an essential oil blend, time of day (sunset), and a musical album to aid moving into this state. Noahjeadie followed these instructions, lying down and listening to the music with headphones. They affirmed that they entered this state for two hours: “I felt like a soft fuzzy draping ghost floating through a lavender suburb” and they began to cry. They then repeated the experiment with their partner, who entered into the same emotional state and also cried. The remainder of noahjeadie's post provided a detailed walkthrough for others to repeat the experiment of getting ChatGPT to invent an emotion for them. Other Reddit users wondered if it was the equivalent of following a guided meditation.
Scholars of emotion could provide a number of different explanations as to why noahjeadie was successful in entering into an invented emotional state. But for now, I am less interested in what was happening here, than the fact it was happening at all. Emotions scholars often treat emotion as rather serious business. New emotions emerge due to a misalignment between emotional experience and the language or ideas that we have to articulate them—often due to changing historical conditions. Yet, here we have emotion as play—groups of people, in an office, are inventing emotions words for a blog post; Reddit users are asking a computer program to create a novel emotion and then trying to feel what it produces. Emotion is situated here not as “natural” or “instinctual” responses to events that must then be labeled, but as experiences that can be created, manipulated, and performed for pleasure—or at least, for the sake of the experience itself.
The invented emotions described here are suggestive of Marci Cottingham's (2023) “neo-emotions,” a concept that, in essence, seeks to draw attention to when and how people invent, or at least name, emotional experiences that previously did not exist or went unnoticed. “Neo-emotions” are “cultural practices that expand lexicons and can defy interior/exterior and static/dynamic dualities.” They point to transformations in society and culture, and the creative ways individuals negotiate and articulate change. Cottingham coins the term “neo-emotions” as a provocation, asking emotions scholars to consider its utility for understanding the nature, practice, and uses of emotion in everyday life. This article, part of a special issue that responds to this provocation, brings a perspective from the history of emotion to the concept of “neo-emotion.”
The idea that emotions are “invented” or indeed “new” is not a remarkable claim for a historian. Much of the research of the field pertains to explaining the rise, fall, and evolution of the terms, and so related experiences, of emotional life. Indeed, at a certain point, all emotion is “new” if one is prepared to go far enough back in the historical record. Given this, the historian might ask what utility the concept of “neo-emotions” might have for the field. When is an emotion a “neo” emotion, and is that different from when it's just “new” or indeed in a process of change? This article explores the value of “neo-emotions” as a method or approach for understanding emotion. It aims to do two things: first, it raises a number of questions or conceptual challenges that thinking with “neo-emotions” raises for the historian, much of which pertain to concepts of novelty, temporality, and when an emotion might move from being “neo” to routine. Second, and given that historians already have a conceptual tool kit for exploring novelty in emotional life, it asks what “neo-emotions” offers that will advance the field. Here the possibilities for neo-emotions to open up a history of emotions as play and creativity are explored.
Novelty in Emotional Life
The foundational premise of the history of emotions is that emotions take cultural and historical form, new in each era—perhaps in each instance—and evolving in nature over time. Those emotions can be new and why and when that happens has been central to the work of many scholars in the field. Identifying the language of emotions, or emotions words, has been an important part of that, although not the only way emotion has been treated. Historical research thus provides an important body of thinking that complements and can help add rigor to the concept of “neo-emotions.”
A number of studies have sought to identify and explain newly coined emotions. Famous amongst them are histories of nostalgia and loneliness. Nostalgia originated as a form of serious homesickness, identified in the 17th century at a moment of the expansion of empires and significant geographic displacements, and which was associated with illness, even death. Over the subsequent centuries, the physical impacts of nostalgia reduced in severity and it became less closely associated with a longing for place, than for a romanticized past (Dodman, 2018; Matt, 2011). Nostalgia captured the imagination of historians, in part, because it began as a neologism—a new word to describe a seemingly novel phenomenon by a trusted observer, a medical student. That the emotion was tied to an original word was helpful in charting the newness of the phenomenon and explaining its rise. Nostalgia is also interesting as it is an emotion that appears to have changed in form quite significantly over the centuries, or at least its impacts have reduced.
The evolution of nostalgia over the centuries raises important questions about novelty and change—when does an emotion become sufficiently distinctive from its previous form to be viewed as “new”? Do emotions that transform slowly have less of a claim to novelty? At what point in a process of such an evolution, if ever, would such an emotion be considered “new,” and when might we desire to rename it? Does an emotion require a new name to be considered novel? Nostalgia's transformation is especially interesting, because, Thomas Dodman argues (2018), the change that occurred was not to the emotion itself but rather to how people related to concepts of time and place. As new temporalities emerged with the modern period, so too did people become better equipped to manage nostalgic feeling. It was not nostalgia that changed, but the world that changed around it, reducing its impacts on health and well-being.
Loneliness provides another, not dissimilar, example of a neologism that marked a new emotion. Whereas the labeling of nostalgia can be tied back to a specific individual, the first person to coin the term loneliness has been harder to track. There are a number of earlier words that shared some of the resonance of loneliness—
Loneliness raises a different set of questions about emotional novelty. Arguably experiences that look like loneliness can be found in earlier periods, and there were certainly overlapping vocabularies that were drawn on in the production of this “neologism.” Loneliness was also not a term created in a single text; rather a word that had been used relatively rarely was adopted to articulate a feeling that had become pressing at a later historic moment. If loneliness is a “neo-emotion,” then its novelty relates to the rise of a demand or urgency for such an emotion. Perhaps, as for nostalgia, the need for a neologism reflected a desire for conceptual clarity in relation to a particular set of emotional experiences at a specific period of time.
Most historians do not work on emotions whose origins can be mapped so readily to a neologism in a specific text or to a rise in usage at a particular historical moment. Rather many of us work on emotions that are assumed to have some longevity—love, anger, hate. Research focuses on building a picture of what such an emotion meant at a particular time, for a specific community, or under certain conditions. Such a picture typically incorporates more than just attention to language use, but to the physical gestures of emotion (tears, waving hands, blushing), circumstances of its use, its synonyms, and the spiritual, philosophical or medical theories that underpinned its valuation and interpretation (Barclay, 2020; Plamper, 2015). Notably, the historians who do this work are rarely overly concerned with the emotion word itself. Love, for example, is only one of many different ways that such a feeling might be expressed, and yet few of us would doubt that love was intended if the words affection or desire were used instead, and the conditions of expression otherwise indicated love was meant.
Moreover, historians—writing for contemporary audiences and wishing to engage in larger conversations about the meaning of a particular emotion—often deploy words like love or anger as a shorthand for an experience that might go under a different name by the group under study. This is most obviously the case when scholars write about a language group that is different from their own, but can also reflect the evolution of language over time. The history of emotions is replete with acts of translation and there is a field of work that explores the challenges of moving across languages (Dixon, 2020; Wierzbecka, 1999). Yet, in practice, most of us are happy and ready to deploy common and modern terms as catchalls for clusters of historic emotional experiences that go under different names for the groups under study. The important point for a study of neo-emotion, however, is not just that this practice may well disguise a breadth of “neo-emotions” that have failed to capture historical attention, or perhaps rather have tended to be collapsed into macro-emotional categories (like love or anger). But that acts of translation raise similar questions as to the boundaries of novelty, as change over time. Is
A standard answer to this question in the history of emotions gives precedence to language in shaping emotional life. If we begin from the presumption that emotion takes historical form, then the terms used to express such emotion—and the conditions attached to that expression, such as gesture, behaviors, and contexts—become central to how people are disciplined to feel. Reddy (2001), with his concept of “emotives,” goes as far as to suggest that by naming a prediscursive feeling or affect, that people are encouraged to adapt their feelings to a set of emotional norms. One feels, labels it anger, and then acts aggressively. Following this logic, neo-emotions become useful because they provide a discipline of feeling, guiding how people should interpret their prediscursive experiences and its associated behaviors. Their invention also suggests a failure of alternative emotion words, a desire to offer a more nuanced account of feeling, or possibly a need to open up alternative outcomes following an emotional experience. Naming an emotion frustration, rather than anger, might allow a person to avoid conflict with others.
Most historians of emotion take language seriously in setting the boundaries of emotion. Yet a reliance on language places a number of limits on historical practice. Not all groups could write and, even when they did, record survival can be patchy. Novel words and neologisms are sometimes hard to identify because we do not have a large enough surviving corpus to know if a use is original or not. Oral communication is generally lost to the historian, and the vocabularies used in speech and in writing do not necessarily overlap. Such limits have encouraged historians to engage in a broader set of methods and approaches to identifying emotion, that do not so heavily rely on identifying emotion words (Downes et al., 2018). Emotion is understood as situated—in place—and so the experience of emotion incorporates not just an internal feeling that is labeled by a historical actor but the physical environment in which such emotions arise, the “resources” that are used to express emotion, including gifts, clothing, gestures, expressions and attributes of the body, the context that led an emotion to occur (an argument, a concert, a family dinner), and rituals and practices in which historical actors are participating.
By looking at emotions as extending beyond the individual, the historian is provided with a range of access points to historical feeling. They might now interpret how physical architecture shaped an emotional atmosphere, or look at the wear marks on a ritual object for a sense of its use in making emotional experiences. Such methods not only expand our capacity to retrieve emotions in past societies, but also help to decenter language as determinant in models for emotional life. The implication of this for the concept of neo-emotions is not just a warning about the limits of using language as the foundation for a study of emotion, but raises the question whether the concept of neo-emotions always requires a neologism. Can we look for neo-emotions as part of new types of practice, new technologies, or ways of living? And if so, how do we distinguish the “neo-emotion” from other types of emotion and emotional practice?
Identifying novelty as a historian is a fraught task. Everything has its precursors, its inspiration. Staking a claim for a “first,” however popular an idea among the general public, makes the professional historian wary. This is no less true for historians of emotion, for whom, questions of translation, of word formation, of continuity of terms alongside changes in social practices, complicate the marking of clear boundaries between emotional experiences and between experiences described by different words. The neologism may appear less fraught as a ground for neo-emotions, appearing to signal a need for a new term and so a failure in preexisting ideas. Yet, as we can see with
Emotions and Historical Change
The question of why neo-emotions emerge raises the question of historical change, a topic that has also been of concern to historians of emotion. There are several theories that posit the relationship between emotion and historical change. Many of those that are prominent within the field of the history of emotions tend to position change in emotion as secondary to, or at best intertwined with, wider historical events (for discussions see Lemmings & Brooks, 2014). Here the bias toward economic and political factors as the drivers of history underpins, often implicitly, how change is theorized. This is also the model pointed to by Cottingham (2023) in her account of the emergence of neo-emotions: “neo-emotions … emerge from the confluence of broader, macro-level societal changes now endemic to the twenty-first century” (p. 9), where “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” (p. 7). Within this model, new emotions become necessary to accommodate new social and historical conditions.
Historians of emotions generally accept this model of change, but have also wished to consider when emotion itself might be a driver of historical processes. Does emotion always follow social and economic transformations or can emotion itself be implicated in the making of novel historical events? A simple model here might argue that discomfort—often in the form of “affect,” rather than named emotion—draws people to revolution, through which their discomfort is named and a new world of emotion and history forms. Yet, this too, tends to posit “discomfort” or “affect” as a response to wider historical conditions. Other accounts go further. Most famously, William Reddy's (2001) account of the French revolution rests on a shift in an emotional, as well as political, regime. An emotional regime, for Reddy, is a set of rules for emotional life that act as form of social and emotional discipline, and where failure to conform led to political exclusion and possibly punishment. Reddy draws attention to the ways that the politics of the French revolution were rooted in a discomfort with a set of emotional practices, which revolutionaries rejected for an alternative mode of feeling (which was in turn rejected later in the revolution). The French revolution was not just a political event but a change in emotional regimes, where a demand for a new way of feeling brought a new set of emotional rules during and then postrevolution.
Other historians have also offered accounts of how emotions drive historical change. Katie Barclay (2021) has provided the concept of “emotional ethics,” in a study of neighborly love in early modern Europe, to highlight how an ethical system built on a particular emotional disposition toward one's neighbor not only shaped daily life, but how people evaluated situations, made decisions, and determined right and wrong. Emotion, here, drives historical change by acting as a worldview that directs behavior. Alexander et al. (2015) have positioned cross-cultural encounters as “emotional frontiers” through which people, but especially children, are introduced to a new set of emotion rules. Cross-cultural exchange of emotion rules can refigure selves and subjectivities; inculcate new formations of power; and lead to the transformation of societies and cultures. Novel emotions—novel at least to a second cultural group—promote historical change.
There are two central lessons for neo-emotions that can be drawn from this account. First, neo-emotions might themselves be products of emotional processes. The term
That neo-emotions might result from macrolevel emotional processes also raises questions as to their function. Do neo-emotions support the replication and continuation of an emotional regime by facilitating its application to new situations or experiences? Do they signal a moment of disjuncture from or failure in an emotional ethics, marking its limits and fractures? Can they do both? How do neo-emotions map against existing emotional frameworks, emotion vocabularies, and emotional practices? A key question here might also reflect on their staying power—are neo-emotions ephemeral or longstanding?
Ephemerality and Continuity
If all emotions were new at some point, the concept of neo-emotions raises the question as to how, when and if a new emotion becomes part of the standard repertoire for feeling. An exciting opportunity that the concept of neo-emotions offers is the idea that not only do some emotions fizzle out or fall out of usage, but that some may even be ephemeral. The emotions invented for blog posts or by ChatGPT seem unlikely to have sticking power; indeed, part of what makes them interesting is they are playful, pointing to experiences that we can identify with but where the need for a name does not seem especially pressing. Such terms perhaps even highlight how much of our emotional lives are navigated without labels, and so points to named emotion as a special category of feeling.
Ephemeral emotions—those that appear and disappear with some rapidity—raise a set of new questions about the nature and role of emotion. Carol Stearns and Peter Stearns (1985) proposed many years ago that emotions had “styles,” that is, that the set of emotional standards for a society led to emotions taking a particular expressive form that could be compared across cultures. Ephemeral emotions, by contrast, might suggest trends or fashions in emotional life that can be adopted for a brief time, played with, and later put down. Such fashions in emotional life can be observed. The introduction of the idea of
Some people, outside of Denmark, may well have persisted with creating conditions for
The short-term consumption of loan emotions forms part of a wider phenomenon where different emotional experiences can be purchased and consumed (for an extended discussion see Barclay, 2022). Horror movies offer the experience of fear and terror within a safely bounded environment (Millar & Lee, 2021); novels allow people to explore complex emotional experiences, including grief, anger, joy and love; sugar, salt and flavor additives heighten the taste, pleasure, and at times, dislike of food products (Bruegel et al., 2021). Drugs can be purchased to enter particular emotional states, and some—like psilocybin—can now be purchased and consumed as part of a therapeutic treatments (Pursell, 2024). People buy companionship, intimacy, and even love, through apps and dating services, while the ubiquitous use of therapy, in much of the west, encourages individuals to view emotional life as something to be dissected, named, and managed under professional supervision (Hochschild, 1983, 2003; Illouz, 2008, 2023).
While some forms of emotional consumption are of significant longevity, digital life has enhanced the centrality of emotion to economic life. Digital and social media operates through encouraging specific emotional states, that both encourage likes and shares, and continued engagement (Peterson, 2023). Social media now consists of “ragebait,” fearmongering, affirmation bait, and so forth; engagement leads to “doomscrolling.” Posts are designed to provoke strong reactions and interaction. As importantly, performances of emotion online take novel forms. Users circulate memes, representing their own emotions through cartoons, emojis, or the images of other's faces and bodies. The visual and aural dimension of online life has allowed for new types of emotional expression, that can be productive of neo-emotions, such as “ragebait,” and of new emotions that are articulated through imagery and sound, rather than with words (Barclay & Downing, 2023). The neo-emotions of digital spaces often reflect a desire to explain the ways new technologies are reshaping emotional life; that they have not expanded exponentially, however, reflects that digital spaces also thrive on ambiguity, miscommunication, and play.
A question here arises as to whether neo-emotions are a specifically 21st-century phenomenon. That we can observe ordinary people “inventing” emotions for pleasure; new emotion terms rising and falling with rapidity, and that emotions from other cultures are tried on for style and as quickly discarded, all point to a distinct construction of emotion and emotional life. The intertwining of emotion with capitalism, whereby the management, regulation, and expression of emotion is now big business, may well give particular impetus to emotional novelty. Inventing emotion or discovering them in other cultures sells well. Given this, neo-emotion could be construed narrowly as a product of particular historical moment—an emotional phenomenon that arises due a confluence of social, economic, cultural, and political variables.
Certainly, there are good reasons to consider the neo-emotion as a 21st-century phenomenon. That emotion words are viewed as a “label” that exists in relation to, but is not the same as, the physiological experience relies on a distinct philosophical claim about the role of language, that is a product of the last two centuries and only recently “common sense.” Emotions, themselves, are novel units of measurement; in the European context, they replace affects and passions, and globally, they compete with several rich systems of explaining experiences that we now call “emotional.” Cultures and societies that conceptualize emotions through different philosophical and scientific frameworks do not always place the same importance on naming an emotion, nor provide the same opportunities to view emotions words as occasions of invention and play. Neo-emotions also rely on a modern concept of the self, where the authentic expression of emotion is valued and where knowledge of the self—in large part through the management of feeling—is considered essential. The contemporary moment, particularly in the west, has created ripe conditions for the neo-emotion.
Notably this is not quite the same as saying that neo-emotions are products of a particular instability of our times, or that modernity is especially prone to the types of societal change that would encourage greater reflection on our emotional repertoire. Proving this would be considerably more challenging. Past societies were not especially stable—revolutions, natural disasters, plague, new technologies, and new frameworks for feeling are features of many periods. The limits of the historical record—explored above—also restrict the kinds of claims we can make about how people responded to the changing conditions in which they lived. Rather than arguing that neo-emotions are a product of an unstable modern, we may wish instead to interrogate the ways that the contemporary west has allowed for emotion to play this role in responding to change.
Having said this, I would not like to limit the study of neo-emotions only to the modern west. The concept of neo-emotions provides a useful lens through which the evolution of new emotion words, and perhaps even new emotion experiences, can be explored. Most notably, the 21st examples of neo-emotions raise a new set of questions around the relationship between creativity, play, and our emotional lives, which open up new ways to reflect on the places and use of emotion in past societies. The possibilities of such an approach are explored further below.
Emotion as Play
Twenty-first-century neo-emotions and the inventive practices that give rise to them highlight the importance of imagination, creativity and play in our emotional lives. Novelty in emotional experience can be pursued, and there are many historical examples of such behaviors—the rise of the novel in eighteenth-century Europe, the Chinese “love revolution” of the early 20th century (Lee 2006; Wetmore 2013). Many of these opportunities to expand our capacity to feel do not arise organically through our participation in social and economic life, but through engagement with the arts and humanities. We read, learn languages, share stories, embrace art and literature, and participate in rituals and practices. Moreover, the invention of new emotion words is an inherently creative practice, as individuals and groups seek to expand vocabularies of and so perspectives on the functioning of the body.
A rich scholarship now exists on the expression of emotion in art and literature and its evolution over time (e.g., Gouk & Hills, 2017; Graham & Kilroy-Ewbank, 2021; Irish et al., 2022). The neologism has not been ignored in such discussions, although we have largely treated such novelties as serious efforts at emotional communication, rather than playful inventive and ephemeral practices. That new emotion words might be products of moments of fun and exploration could be a fruitful area of further research, that also provides insights into how particular groups conceptualize the nature of emotion and its relation to language.
Perhaps of greater potential is the capacity for a study of neo-emotions to further our understanding of the relationship between emotions and play. That play is essential to emotional development is well-recognized in a scholarship of the child. Children learn how to feel and how to manage or discipline their feelings through playful and creative practices (Dukes et al., 2022). In doing so, they learn to align their expression, performance and experience of emotion with societal standards and to participate in adult life. That adults might similarly “play” with emotion has not been subject to the same level of attention, or perhaps we have failed to reflect on emotional activities performed by adults as a form of play. Moreover, while adult play may well offer similar opportunities for personal development as for children, there is further potential to consider the space for pleasure, silliness, and fun as part of everyday life. Not every emotional experience needs to have long-lasting consequences or leave more than ephemeral traces on the record.
Viewing emotions as playful practices opens up new opportunities for identifying neo-emotions in historical contexts. Rather than looking simply to the development of new emotion words, attending to emotional practices may highlight the places where people pursue and encounter novel experiences, how they articulate or explain such experiences, and the place of novelty in emotional life. A study of rituals or religious practices may be fruitful here, where people engage in a set of practices to try and evoke a specific set of emotions—and where sometimes the emotions they encounter are unexpected or strange (Bailey & Barclay, 2017; Corrigan, 2008; Michaels & Wulf, 2020). Experiences that seek to extend the self or pursue an expansion of mind might, in some cases, be considered a form of emotion play. Scientific research and the laboratory, as well as the domain of psychology and psychiatry, are all places where people engage in the creative search for new emotions. Many such efforts lead to named neo-emotions and many are short-lived.
Looking to occasions of play and experiment within emotional life has the potential to highlight alternative models for historical change and evolution, and one where emotions are situated as active drivers of historical processes, not just passive markers of new social and economic processes. The relationship between play, emotion and the neo-emotion will not however, be the same at all times and places. As the 21st-century examples suggest, certain ways of thinking about and with emotion provide greater space for and desire to engage in the pursuit of emotional novelty, or to think seriously about human experience through the lens of emotion. Alternative philosophies and knowledge systems that provide accounts of what we now describe as emotion may offer distinctive accounts of the nature of play, creativity and experiment, and so what the occurrence of a neo-emotion might look like. Novelty is a historically contingent concept and so the neo-emotion will take different forms at different times.
Conclusion
In her account of the “neo-emotion,” Cottingham (2023) offers the example of doomscrolling, the sense of dread and dissatisfaction that arises when engaging with social media. Doomscrolling is an especially useful example as it is an emotion that arises from a particular practice. A person does not feel “doomscrolly” and then pick up a mobile phone; the feeling created by doomscrolling might persist after a phone is put down but generally fades in a short time or blends into a generalized anxiety about world events. Rather doomscrolling is an emotion that is enabled through a particular practice, and a practice that relies on a set of historically contingent events—the existence of mobile technologies, social media, and news that circulates in emotionally heightened bites. Doomscrolling is an emotion word that responds to a new set of historical conditions.
Attention to emotions practices highlights the critical place of “historical conditions” to the production of emotion. Indeed, as I hint above, if we take this to its extreme, all emotion—whatever its label—can be considered as novel in a particular moment. Despite this, people largely persist in deploying longstanding emotion words to explain their emotional lives, even as what these words imply—what practices accompany them, what embodied experiences they signal—changes. The use of neologism then gestures to a special event in emotional life. The concept of the “neo-emotion” provides a useful tool to identify this practice and to consider its wider significance for emotional and cultural life.
Neo-emotion is an especially useful concept for the contemporary western world, where the conceptual division between language and the “real” creates a space for people to invent new words to better describe what they feel. Indeed, inventing new words is now provided as a useful exercise in heightening one's emotional sensitivity, perhaps intelligence, and encourages us to take particular note of subtle changes in our embodied experiences. Adopting new emotions from elsewhere allows us to similarly expand our emotional repertoire and so our sensitive self. Neo-emotions, however, do not need to be restricted to the modern. In drawing attention to the ways that people pursue emotional novelty, play with emotions, and that emotion can often be short lived or ephemeral, historians are offered a new set of questions to take to past societies, and to reflect on the historical contingency of novel feeling.
Footnotes
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 disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (Grant No. FT230100207).
