Emotion Review

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.

Black Americans are disproportionately exposed to police violence, medical racism, and workforce discrimination in comparison to their White counterparts. Controlling images that position Black people as emotionless criminals, over-emotional, and subjects who feel pain differently have been used to justify these racial disparities. This paper explores how Black Americans articulate complicated emotions produced by living in the United States as a citizen while American institutions are simultaneously organized around anti-Black racism. Black Americans have expanded their emotional vocabulary and developed feeling some type of way as a neo-emotion that abandons a search for accurate description by relying on emotional opacity and feelings that don’t register as feelings to refuse the terms that equate emotional knowability with one's access to humanity.

This article analyzes the emotions of alienation, estrangement, and nostalgia, and how they are central to the production of neo-emotions in contemporary society. Alienation is a product of the macro-social context of capitalist societies and contemporary neo-emotions are a response to this, addressing the current misalignment between people, their emotional experiences, and their dynamic environment. I consider how alienation affects those on the left of politics, including those involved in radical activism, and how neo-emotions are the creative practices that forge new identities and collectives for active resistance. Those struggling to create non-alienated societies always experienced conflicting emotions, like optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, but these can be synthesized into positive neo-emotions such as progressive nostalgia and radical hope.

Neo-emotions are defined by one shared characteristic: they are a response to macro-societal changes. To gain full insight into when neo-emotions occur, a sociological approach needs to be complemented with a psychological perspective to conceptualize the relation between micro- and macro-level processes. I argue that neo-emotions can be considered group-based emotions. Their social function is to regulate potential challenges elicited by societal changes which one's bonds with members of one's group. Neo-emotions increase belongingness to a group and demarcate one's own group from other groups. In addition to strengthening one's social identity, neo-emotions have a societal function to strengthen social movements, providing awareness, commitment, and change. An adequate emotion vocabulary supports these functions but is not a necessary condition for neo-emotions to emerge.