Have you ever felt “velvetmist”? 

It’s a “complex and subtle emotion that elicits feelings of comfort, serenity, and a gentle sense of floating.” It’s peaceful, but more ephemeral and intangible than contentment. It might be evoked by the sight of a sunset or a moody, low-key album.  

If you haven’t ever felt this sensation—or even heard of it—that’s not surprising. A Reddit user named noahjeadie generated it with ChatGPT, along with advice on how to evoke the feeling. With the right essential oils and soundtrack, apparently, you too can feel like “a soft fuzzy draping ghost floating through a lavender suburb.”

Don’t scoff: Researchers say more and more terms for these “neo-­emotions” are showing up online, describing new dimensions and aspects of feeling. Velvetmist was a key example in a journal article about the phenomenon published in July 2025. But most neo-emotions aren’t the inventions of emo artificial intelligences. Humans come up with them, and they’re part of a big change in the way researchers are thinking about feelings, one that emphasizes how people continuously spin out new ones in response to a changing world. 

Velvetmist might’ve been a chatbot one-off, but it’s not unique. The sociologist Marci Cottingham—whose 2024 paper got this vein of neo-emotion research started—cites many more new terms in circulation. There’s “Black joy” (Black people celebrating embodied pleasure as a form of political resistance), “trans euphoria” (the joy of having one’s gender identity affirmed and celebrated), “eco-anxiety” (the hovering fear of climate disaster), “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 “doomer” (one who is relentlessly pessimistic) or “doomscrolling” (being glued to an endless feed of bad news in an immobilized state combining apathy and dread). 

Of course, emotional vocabulary is always evolving. During the Civil War, doctors used the centuries-old term “nostalgia,” combining the Greek words for “returning home”and “pain,” to describe a sometimes fatal set of symptoms suffered by soldiers—a condition we’d probably describe today as post-traumatic stress disorder. Now nostalgia’s meaning has mellowed and faded to a gentle affection for an old cultural product or vanished way of life. And people constantly import emotion words from other cultures when they’re convenient or evocative—like hygge (the Danish word for friendly coziness) or kvell (a Yiddish term for brimming over with happy pride). 

Cottingham believes that neo-­emotions are proliferating as people spend more of their lives online. These coinages help us relate to one another and make sense of our experiences, and they get a lot of engagement on social media. So even when a neo-emotion is just a subtle variation on, or combination of, existing feelings, getting super-specific about those feelings helps us reflect and connect with other people. “These are potentially signals that tell us about our place in the world,” she says. 

These neo-emotions are part of a paradigm shift in emotion science. For decades, researchers argued that humans all share a set of a half-dozen or so basic emotions. But over the last decade, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a clinical psychologist at Northeastern University, has become one of the most cited scientists in the world for work demonstrating otherwise. By using tools like advanced brain imaging and studying babies and people from relatively isolated cultures, she has concluded there’s no such thing as a basic emotional palette. The way we experience and talk about our feelings is culturally determined. “How do you know what anger and sadness and fear are? Because somebody taught you,” Barrett says. 

If there are no true “basic” biological emotions, this puts more emphasis on social and cultural variations in how we interpret our experiences. And these interpretations can change over time. “As a sociologist, we think of all emotions as created,” Cottingham says. Just like any other tool humans make and use, “emotions are a practical resource people are using as they navigate the world.” 

Some neo-emotions, like velvetmist, might be mere novelties. Barrett playfully suggests “chiplessness” to describe the combined hunger, frustration, and relief of getting to the bottom of the bag. But others, like eco-anxiety and Black joy, can take on a life of their own and help galvanize social movements.  

Both reading about and crafting your own neo-emotions, with or without chatbot assistance, could be surprisingly helpful. Lots of research supports the benefits of emotional granularity. Basically, the more detailed and specific words you can use to describe your emotions, both positive and negative, the better. 

Researchers analogize this “emodiversity” to biodiversity or cultural diversity, arguing that a more diverse world is more enriched. It turns out that people who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, spend fewer days hospitalized for illness, and are less likely to drink when stressed, drive recklessly, or smoke cigarettes. And many studies show emodiversity is a skill that, with training, people can develop at any age. Just imagine cruising into this sweet, comforting future. Is the idea giving you a certain dreamy thrill?

Are you sure you’ve never felt velvetmist?

Anya Kamenetz is a freelance education reporter who writes the Substack newsletter The Golden Hour.