Neo-emotions: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda

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.