About the workshop

The concept of ‘neo-emotions’ is based on the idea that our emotional range changes over time and in context. Not only have the meanings of classic terms such as anger, happiness, or embarrassment been transformed, but new kinds of emotions have also emerged. This workshop brings together scholars from different disciplines to examine how feelings become established emotions, which conditions catalyse ‘inventing’ new emotions, and what role digital technologies and AI play in this context.

Recent work in the history, philosophy, and sociology of emotions has drawn attention to the concept of ‘neo-emotions’, the idea that our emotional range changes over time and in context. In a formative essay published in 2024, Marci D. Cottingham has suggested that neo-emotions occur when the relationship between our emotional vocabulary and our environment is disrupted, and that we must describe a feeling that hitherto had no name. Nostalgia, for example, became socially recognisable only in the late 17th century when it was first designated a mental illness suffered by war-shocked veterans. Ambivalence was often experienced, but was not named until 1910, when it was introduced as a specialised term to describe schizophrenia. Disgust, anger, happiness, and embarrassment all have long etymological histories, yet new meanings have emerged for these terms over time. This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of emotion scholars to grapple with the following and related questions:

• Under what conditions does an inchoate feeling become a defined, culturally recognisable emotion?
• How do theories of neo-emotions intersect with or undermine Paul Ekman’s and others’ claims for universal ‘basic’ emotions?
• Are we inventing new emotions to cope with rapid change and what has been called an ‘epistemic collapse’?
• What neo-emotions are evoked by digitalisation and our interactions with ‘emotional’ AI?