Neo-emotions: Introduction to the Special Issue

Introduction

This special issue is dedicated to neo-emotions, a concept introduced from a sociological perspective by Cottingham (2024), to highlight and examine a variety of emotion terms recently introduced in English vocabulary, and associated practices—such as doomscrolling, Black joy, compersion, and eco-grief. Neo-emotions, as Cottingham characterizes them, are “cultural practices that expand established lexicons” (2024, p. 5). Specifically, this expansion takes place when people's affective practices are out of alignment with those typically expected in prevalent or accepted sociocultural contexts. Neo-emotions emerge out of a discrepancy between one's emotion vocabulary and one's feelings, where the former is deemed inadequate to capture the latter.

Cottingham (2024) called for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of neo-emotions—one aimed at understanding whether and how emotions shape, and are shaped by, recent shifts in various cultural practices, defining social events, political agendas, and digital-technological developments. For much of their time as objects of study, emotions have been understood as timeless: a core part of the human mind that implicates basic and universally hard-wired adaptations. Social and cultural constructionists have taken issue with basic emotions research, challenging us to see emotions as deeply linked to and shaped by culture. This link to culture emphasizes the dynamic and plastic nature of emotions. As scholarship details, the words, experiences, expectations, and values associated with a given emotion are subject to change across time and place, and emotions typically change with them (Cancian & Gordon, 1988; Elias, 1978; Frevert et al., 2014). And yet, even constructionists have downplayed the possibility that new emotions and emotion terms might emerge. As Averill (2012) argued “People are not free to invent their own emotions any more than they are free to invent their own language—not if they wish to be understood” (p. 215).

Taking a constructionist view seriously, however, means attending more closely to the various ways that experts, activists, and a variety of other social actors might respond to emerging feelings and attitudes by coining new emotion terms and developing new emotion practices. The authors in this special issue take up the concept of neo-emotions in order to understand how emotion terms and related experiences, behaviors, perspectives, etc. emerge from broader social forces and might themselves serve as potential drivers for other types of change. This special issue takes steps toward an interdisciplinary enterprise, while also keeping a central focus on questions around emotion and social change. The issue includes papers by a historian (Katie Barclay), two sociologists (Corey Miles and Ian Burkitt), and a social psychologist (Agneta Fischer).

In what follows, we begin by providing a brief summary of all contributions. We then offer a few possible ways to read the contributions in relation to each other and other works. Finally, to contextualize this body of work within broader understandings of emotion for the interdisciplinary audience of this journal, we briefly overview the praxeological (or practice-based) approach to emotion in social science, and highlight some parallels with recent frameworks in philosophy and psychology that also emphasize the bodily and situated nature of emotion.

Summary of the Papers: Historical, Sociological, and Social Psychological Perspectives

Historian Katie Barclay (2026) begins our special issue with reflections on how the concept of neo-emotions can be used and informed by work in the history of emotions. She notes that historians have long been tracing “the rise, fall, and evolution of the terms, and so related experiences, of emotional life” (p. #), and that the idea of change and invention when it comes to emotions is hardly a revolutionary notion among historians. She highlights the importance of examining the emergence of both new feelings and new emotion words, turning to examples in the history of emotions that include studies of nostalgia and loneliness. For instance, nostalgia originated in the seventeenth century as a severe form of homesickness tied to illness, but over time it has evolved into a romantic longing for the past. As she points out, however, a focus on emotion words also raises particular challenges for historians, as oral traditions risk being lost to time, and patterns in speech and writing may starkly diverge in particular periods and places. As a result, historians also often resort to the study of other cultural sources to understand the emotional practices of a certain time—such as gestures, rituals, and material culture in the form of clothing, or objects given as gifts or used in rituals (e.g., Downes et al., 2018). Importantly, this broader approach challenges the idea that neo-emotions must always be tied to neologisms (as Fischer, 2026, also notes).

Barclay highlights, too, the potential for emotions themselves to stimulate historical and political change—and, accordingly, further related neo-emotions. She illustrates this idea with the example of the Korean dongjeong and its role in navigating competing moral frameworks under colonialism. Additionally, she notes that neo-emotions can be more or less permanent, and more or less local—as indicated for instance by the Danish concept of hygge, which for a while prodded people inside as well as outside Denmark to take up the term and associated practices, embracing an aesthetic of coziness and comfort in the cold of winter. This emotional practice, however, appears to have been only a relatively temporary and ephemeral “emotional fad.” Finally, Barclay encourages emotion scholars to consider neo-emotions as products of creative play, often involving experimenting with language and new technologies to expand one's emotional repertoire or simply to explore new experiential possibilities. Art and digital practices—including interactions with AI agents which, as she illustrates with the memorable example of velvetmist, can invent and describe new emotional experiences and behaviors—can indeed be sources of creative inspiration, existing alongside the economic and material realities of a particular place and period. While there are, as she notes, good reasons to think that neo-emotions might be especially stimulated in the twenty-first century, historians can still find the concept useful for investigating emotional changes of the past.

The articles from Miles (2026) and Burkitt (2026) extend the sociological lens adopted by Cottingham (2024). Miles engages work in sociology and cultural studies to develop an understanding of the neo-emotion “feeling some type of way”—a phrase exchanged by Black Americans, with complex, simultaneously effable and ineffable features. Building on his earlier work on vibe (Miles, 2023), he theorizes how this phrase has emerged from a marginalized community that is heavily surveilled, steeped in histories of oppression and resilience, and wary of naming their authentic emotions for the easy judgement of others. To name how one feels is a profound vulnerability that not all communities have the luxury of indulging. Miles’ discussion of the phrase “feeling some type of way” shows the emergence of patterns of speech and feeling that indicate how mundane emotion talk resists a strict reliance on established emotion categories. Rather than a single term, a refrain/phrase is repeatedly used to do important cultural work in this community.

Feeling some type of way expresses an ambiguous emotional state that allows one to subtly resist affective governance. As Miles (2026) notes, “Feeling is a racialized political project” (p. #), meaning that how one feels and expresses those feelings is shaped by social structures, while also retaining the potential to resist those structures. This neo-emotion, then, is simultaneously playful, creative, and profound, emerging “in a moment where Black people are always seen but rarely legible” (p. #). Following Barclay's (2026) call to see neo-emotions as emerging from emotional processes that might themselves have consequences, we can understand feeling some type of way as both an outcome of, and a possible catalyst for, changing the racial system—potentially fueling the emergence of social movements against mass incarceration and surveillance that target minority communities. But Miles is skeptical, cautioning us to avoid overly romantic or liberatory readings of a neo-emotion like feeling some type of way. While the phrase tries to open up the possibility of relationality outside of feelings that align with unambiguous and accepted emotion norms, its liberatory potential rests on a host of other indeterminate factors.

Burkitt (2026) provides a second use of the neo-emotion concept in line with sociological analysis, returning to classic considerations of alienation and solidarity in a Marxist tradition. He shows how an appreciation of class consciousness can inform political emotions like radical hope, nostalgia for an age yet to come, and progressive nostalgia—in contrast to regressive forms of nostalgia. Burkitt's analysis helps us wrestle with a dilemma also identified by Barclay: when does a neo-emotion cease to be new, and become part of the relatively stable and only slowly evolving corpus of established emotions? For Burkitt, estrangement and alienation are hard to pin down in that they are not usually defined as emotions but are not new concepts either—yet they undeniably relate to an individual's alignment (or lack thereof) with one's specific circumstances. These concepts were developed to capture the lived experiences of life under a growing capitalist economy, originally theorized by Marx (1964). Alienation refers to the severing of multiple relationships—between workers and the products of their labor, as well as amongst workers themselves, and more generally amongst human beings. This severing is linked to a distinct feeling of estrangement, as society “comes to feel as though it is an alien or coercive power separate from us, over which we have little power or influence” (Burkitt, 2026, p. #). Feeling alienated or estranged in a Marxist sense might be common in everyday speech in some contexts or rarely used in others, perhaps because these terms more largely describe pervasive collective moods rather than isolated states linked to clearly delineated events. Yet, alienation is, according to Burkitt, centrally connected to colloquial expressions of loneliness and isolation—feelings that overlap with the rise of nostalgia-fueled political movements.

For Burkitt, the reality of an alienated condition in capitalism is necessary context for understanding how nostalgia has recently emerged as a potent political emotion. He importantly emphasizes that nostalgia need not be directed only at the past (see also Geniusas, 2025). It can also be directed at the future, through reconfiguring memories of past communities and solidarity into progressive nostalgia that helps imagine (though not idealize) a better future and can guide future political actions. He defines progressive nostalgia as a neo-emotion that entails “the sadness at the loss of past industries and communities, yet taking their values of collective action and solidarity as sources of pride and joy, projecting these feelings onto a possible future as the basis of a non-alienated society” (Burkitt, 2026, p. #). As with the much-analyzed political right (see Hochschild, 2016), Burkitt contends that the political left likewise warrants more sustained emotional analysis, and that “neo-emotions are important to help us understand this complex combination of alienated emotions: of loss and hope, and of anger alternating with joy at the prospect of renewal” (p. #). Zozobra, solastalgia, and radical hope are further neo-emotions that Burkitt engages as he theorizes the relationship between capitalism, politics, and emerging affective experiences and related collective actions.

Finally, Fischer (2026) uses the concept of neo-emotions to draw out its relevance for understanding the phenomena of group cohesion and social identity. Rooted in a social psychological view that focuses on the functionality of emotions (Fischer & Manstead, 2016), Fischer's paper examines what neo-emotions are, how they spread to others, and what they do for groups. She suggests that we conceptualize neo-emotions as “group-based emotions” triggered by “group-based concerns” (Fischer, 2026, p. x). Fischer helpfully fills out our understanding of neo-emotional processes by noting the role of others in how individuals appraise or judge a given event. As she writes, “Especially in times of uncertainty, which often characterizes major social changes or crises” (Fischer, 2026, p. x), individuals will turn to others in order to determine what to feel, and how act and cope with novel events.

At a cultural level, Fischer draws from the work of Levy (1975) to understand the emergence of new emotion words as indicative of “new shared life experiences” that have been previously “hypocognized” (Levy's term) (Fischer, 2026, p. x). In other words, new terms point to cultural issues of rising importance that have previously lacked clear vocabulary. The introduction of these new terms can bring attention to these issues, leading, in some cases at least, to new practices being “hypercognized.” Ultimately, Fischer sees neo-emotions as serving two important goals that all emotions have in the functioning of society: the simultaneous cultivation of social connectivity and social differentiation. Rejoining Barclay's (2026) interest in the permanent vs. ephemeral character of some emotions, Fischer also notes the role of duration in how we classify feelings as emotions, sentiments, and moods. Accordingly, she suggests that more attention could be paid to the duration or diffuseness of particular neo-emotions—for example pointing to “neo-sentiments,” which could help emotion scholars link individual experiences with group identities and macro-societal trends.

Emerging Questions in Researching Neo-Emotions

Even when they raise questions and critical points, the papers in this special issue take a broadly sympathetic and constructive approach to the notion of neo-emotions. They all accept Cottingham's (2024) original suggestion that neo-emotions emerge from a misalignment of people's affective states, established lexicon, and cultural, social, and political circumstances. Within this shared framework, the papers diverge in their approaches while also revealing notable parallels. In this section, we suggest a few ways of reading the contributions in relation to one another and to a broader body of work.

To begin with, we find different emphases on the positive, negative, or mixed character, conditions, and/or implications of neo-emotions. While Barclay (2026) highlights the potential for neo-emotions to emerge from a child-like playfulness (thus exposing a positive aspect of neo-emotions), Miles’ (2026) work highlights the sometimes life-or-death implications of creative emotional expression. When one's claim to full humanity rests on the appropriateness of one's emotions, feeling some type of way expresses a subjective state that resists tidy classification and mixes positive and negative feeling. Feeling some type of way is an emotion with a complex and highly mixed valence. It arises in environments marked by hostile surveillance, while also fostering an ability to share with others and survive in such environments. Proposing and practicing this neo-emotion is a form of creative play, yet a very serious one—a reclamation of agency and humanity in systems that dehumanize and oppress, even if the term cannot restructure those systems directly.

This points to a dilemma with various other neo-emotion practices that have emerged from marginalized groups, such as Black joy, trans joy, gay pride, self-care, and self-love (Cottingham et al., 2023; Gould, 2009; Lu & Steele, 2019; shuster & Westbrook, 2022). Such neo-emotions raise questions about the relationship between systems and individuals. While developing new emotion labels, and by extension implicating new modes of feeling, might make dehumanizing conditions more livable (e.g., making toxic conditions habitable; see Maddox, 2022), we might ask whether, in doing so, they render radical change more or less likely. Gould (2009), for example, argues that grief and shame were transformed into gay pride through the early AIDS activism of the 1980s. Using gay pride as transformed grief, these new emotion practices led to cultural and structural changes that made life for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer communities more livable. Yet feminist considerations of self-love and self-care highlight how such emotion practices can serve to maintain unrealistic ideals and the very market logics that continue to disadvantage women (Rahbari, 2023). Questions, then, about when and how neo-emotions might catalyze social change, as Barclay (2026) and others raise, are ones that future research on neo-emotions should continue to consider.

Consideration of neo-emotions and social change can be developed in dialogue with broader social-psychological questions about the social function of emotions, as outlined by Fischer (2026). In line with the various functions that Fischer identifies, Miles’ analysis of feeling some type of way suggests that this neo-emotion guides “relations with others” (Fischer, 2026, p. x), as it provides “a site of relationality. We learn about each other through our inability to capture or easily define one another” (Miles, 2026, p. x). Burkitt (2017) and others have argued for a “relational view of emotion” in which emotions are not seen as inherent to any one individual or entity, but produced through the relating of multiple entities. In Miles and Fischer, this relationality takes on new meaning, as emotions are indeed specific to the social relations in which an individual is embedded—the social actors they interact with, both literally and imaginatively, but also function to guide one in navigating those social relations.

An additional area of interdisciplinary reflection spurred by Miles (2026) and Fischer (2026) concerns the question of how saliently and consciously one must identify with a group in order to feel and relate to certain neo-emotions. As Fischer's work on gender (2000) and recent sociological work on emotions and race have argued (Wingfield, 2010, 2021), certain groups have been culturally framed as overly or insufficiently emotional. Some groups, like climate activists, result from one's consciously chosen affiliation, while others, like gender and race, are “ascribed” (assigned at birth) rather than “achieved” (Foner, 1979). Fischer makes a strong argument for seeing neo-emotions as group-based, and her approach is supported by Miles’ in-depth analysis of feeling some type of way. But this group-based approach raises questions about how closely and deliberately one must identify as, say, a climate activist to feel solastalgia or eco-grief, for example. What if one stumbles across these terms without having the prerequisite identification with climate activists or heavily surveilled Black Americans? Might learning a neo-emotion term potentially spur imaginative and empathetic understanding of the novel emotion, even if not the full range of the associated experience, behavior, and so on? More broadly, this line of research raises questions about whether and how neo-emotion terms, in line with Miles’ and Fischer's arguments, might spur deeper empathic understanding across different groups. These are some possible questions to consider in seeing certain neo-emotions as distinctly group-based.

Next, we note that both Miles (2026) and Burkitt (2026) demonstrate the fruitfulness of considering alienation and relationality in theorizing emotions. Feeling some type of way emerges in conditions where one's race alienates one from the majority group, leading minorities to experience heightened surveillance and scrutiny. At the same time, through the phrase's opacity, members of a minority group forge “human connections through emotions that are difficult to know or translate” (Miles, 2026, p. x). In writing of “a freedom that has yet to come” (p. X), Miles’ article shares similarities with Burkitt's (2026) focus on the role of progressive nostalgia in left-leaning politics. Although there is only one explicit reference to alienation in Miles’ contribution (p. x), feeling some kind of way is arguably one way to manage a certain form, or several sub-forms, of alienation—where the term is understood broadly, to refer to not just to the Marxist sense of alienation from one's labor in capitalist societies, but to overall estrangement, disconnection, dehumanization, and sense of powerlessness. Of course, feeling some type of way does not reduce to the latter; like radical hope and nostalgia for an age to come discussed by Burkitt, it is a way to simultaneously undergo, manage, and transform alienation. In reading Miles and Burkitt together, we can ask new questions about the relevance of alienation and economic conditions to emerging neo-emotions.

Neo-Emotions as Something We Do: The Practice Approach to Emotion

Given the multidisciplinary nature of this journal, we devote this final section to elaborating on the overall approach to emotion that frames the concept of neo-emotions as Cottingham (2024) originally presented it, and as the papers in this special issue also discuss it. The approach in question is known as the practice (or praxeological) approach, which, as the name suggests, emphasizes practices—roughly, a set of (more or less) structured activities. In sociology, this approach is traditionally traced to Pierre Bourdieu's work on habitus, particularly on how social structures infuse and shape the physical body and its doings (Bourdieu, 1990). It also includes works by several other thinkers, trained and working primarily in philosophy and social science (a good introduction to the field is provided by Schatzki, 2012). In a nutshell, the practice approach emphasizes that human social life is centrally characterized by doings—activities, habits, customs, rituals, and so on. Sayings are also doings—doings that involve language and discourse more broadly. Importantly, this is not behaviorism. Practices do not refer, let alone reduce, to mere behavior (understood as a relatively simple and mechanical pattern of responses to stimulations). Practices are, rather, flexible or adaptable complex doings, which include physical actions but also more or less reflective activities of meaning-making, perceptions, appraisals, and experiences. They are dynamic and context-dependent, unfolding in specific ways given unique combinations of social, historical, political, and material circumstances.

The practice approach has been applied to various phenomena, including emotion. Accordingly, some scholars talk of emotion(al) or, more generally, affective practices (e.g., Burkitt, 2014; Cottingham, 2022; Denzin, 1984; Reckwitz, 2012, 2017; Scheer, 2012; Wetherell, 2012; Wiesse, 2019). What these authors share is not so much a concern with providing necessary and sufficient criteria for emotion, but rather a pragmatic understanding of emotions as embodied and situated doings—as, of course, doing anything requires an acting body as well as a context of (inter)action (be it other people, a technology, a label or way of speaking, a ritual, space, substance, and so on). In line with this approach, in Cottingham's (2024) original paper on neo-emotions we read that neo-emotions are cultural practices: dynamic, constrained, and creative practices, examined specifically in relation to the appearance of new terms. New emotion terms emerge as social actors reflexively interpret their experiences and associated sensations, bodily processes, attitudes and/or ways or relating, as novel. In line with Bourdieu's social practice approach, Cottingham (2024) theorized neo-emotions as emerging from the interface of environment and habitus—the set of internalized dispositions, affective tendencies, and vocabulary that one holds. Habitus illuminates the simultaneously conscious and habitual ways in which social practices unfold (Bourdieu, 1990). As one (or one's group) encounters new modes of communication, crises, or cultural events, the habitus must continuously adjust to calibrate expectations and tendencies in line with one's social position.

All of this is very much in line with an approach to emotion that has been developed relatively independently in philosophy over the last decade or so. In fact, all these approaches have common philosophical roots—primarily in pragmatism and phenomenology—so the convergence should not be surprising (although it easy to lose sight of it, as different fields develop and pursue different agendas). Drawing on so-called “embodied” and “embedded” approaches in the philosophy of cognitive science developed from the 1990s on (for a recent introduction to the field, see Shapiro & Spaulding, 2025), and even earlier (think of Hubert Dreyfus's early critique of symbolic AI as a model of the human mind; Dreyfus, 1972), some philosophers have recently called for a parallel embodied and embedded approach to emotion. A key contribution has been a chapter by two philosophers of science (Griffiths & Scarantino, 2009), who called for a “situated” perspective to emotion, and accordingly characterized emotion as embodied and dynamically scaffolded by interactions with other people and the environment more broadly. The authors explicitly built on the work and framework of three social psychologists (Parkinson et al., 2005) who had already extensively emphasized environmental sources of influence on emotion—from cultural ideas, models, values, and norms internalized during socialization; to ecological, sociopolitical, and economic factors; to physical constraints. In line with the idea that emotions are practices, Griffiths and Scarantino (2009) also explicitly characterized emotions as “forms of skillful engagement with the world” (p. 437).

Since then, other theorists have emphasized the situated nature of emotion and related phenomena—with Candiotto and Piredda (2019), for example, explicitly favoring a pragmatist perspective on emotion, and advancing—quite independently from related work in social science—the notion of affective practices. As the authors note, this perspective rejoins the view that affective states are scaffolded by the environment, and that, through manipulations and interactions, people construct affective niches that influence their affective states via continuous feedback loops (e.g., Candiotto & Dreon, 2021; Colombetti, in press; Colombetti & Krueger, 2015; Coninx & Stephan, 2021; Maiese, 2016; Ratcliffe, in press; Steinert et al., 2025).

In fact, the notion of feedback loops points to another idea relevant for the practice approach to emotion (including neo-emotions), namely, philosopher Ian Hacking's claim that the human mind is sensitive to looping effects which depend on cultural practices and available labels for mental states and experiences. As he has argued in several works, human beings—unlike, say, rocks—are not indifferent to how they are classified, but rather interact with attempts (successful or not) to label and categorize them (e.g., Hacking, 1999). Humans are, as he also puts it, interactive kinds: kinds that interact with how they are classified, changing as the classification does, and influencing the classification in return, in a continuous, open-ended process. The public dissemination of labels and descriptions of possible behaviors opens up modalities of existence that people eventually take up, enact, or even reject; and as people change their behavior, labels and descriptions change accordingly.

This is a useful lens through which to read the papers in this special issue since neo-emotions emerge as people respond to new circumstances, either by modifying established emotion labels or creating altogether new terms. As humans respond and change, linguistic practices do so, too, in a continuous dialectical process of adaptation/divergence. Relatedly, we can think of labels for affective states as scaffolding resources which, once introduced and circulating in a given context, may take on a variety of functions—from enabling the description and communication of otherwise difficult-to-express feelings, to highlighting, suggesting, soliciting, or even prescribing certain types of experiences and related activities and expressions; to possibly also straitjacketing and oversimplifying them (Colombetti, 2009; Pugmire, 2010). Note that there need not be a clear direction of causality here (what comes first: the new word, or the emotion?). Practices emerge from available resources, and a characteristic feature of emergent phenomena is that their constituent processes influence one another through what, in complex systems theory, is often called “circular causality” (e.g., Freeman, 1999). While there is often a catalyst, ensuing interactions are typically too entangled to be easily, or even possibly, reduced to traceable linear causal processes. It is useful to think of neo-emotions as similarly emerging from the complex mutual influences of several different practices (language-based and not), none of which can be identified as the leading causal determinant.

Conclusion

In sum, this neo-emotion special issue brings together perspectives from history, sociology, and social psychology, which also overlap with recent developments in the philosophy of emotion. This special issue thus marks an important step toward establishing a corpus of interdisciplinary work on neo-emotions, suggesting that such work will need to pay close attention to emotions as practices that overlap with language, identities, and macro- and meso-level conditions. Neo-emotions inevitably flow from both cultural and structural processes. They can be, simultaneously, products, byproducts, and catalysts of change. Whether the result of playful frivolity or community resilience in inhumane conditions, they offer new ways to document and analyze the relationship between social relations, change, and emotions. While several specific neo-emotions are discussed at length in this special issue, many remain open to future analyses, alongside lingering questions about the conditions in which neo-emotions emerge, as well as their valence, connection to group-based identities, and potential to foster group cohesiveness, differentiation, and social change. More broadly, the practice approach to emotion that underlies the original conceptualization of neo-emotions promises to provide a cohesive, interdisciplinary framework for emotion scholarship going forward.