Oh My God, Is This a New Emotion?

A frame from a story about the mind’s headquarters

Pixar’s sequel takes viewers back inside the mind of Riley, now a teenager. When puberty begins, new emotions arrive at headquarters, Anxiety among them; the old characters do not immediately figure out how to fit the changes into the familiar system. The first teaser introducing the “new emotion” came out in November 2023, well before the film’s summer 2024 premiere. After the announcement, viewers began inventing characters and states of their own that the inner team supposedly lacked.

The frame in the catalog shows Joy in the foreground with her arms spread and other colorful characters visible behind her. It belongs to the scene in which an unfamiliar emotion appears and already conveys a shared surprise on its own. Meme variants often add an invented diagnosis, mood or everyday skill to the frame. Such captions are fan jokes, not extra information about Pixar’s story.

Naming a feeling is also a plot move

The template works as a reaction to a discovery: the character seems to meet a new emotion, and the poster fills in whatever they could never name before. It might be the satisfaction of switching off an alarm, envy of someone else’s free Friday, or panic a minute before answering a phone call. The humor comes from an inner state getting its own cartoon character and a solemn introduction. The phrase “new emotion” stresses that a familiar person is noticing an unexpected reaction in themselves for the first time.

In the film, the emotions are dramatized characters, not a textbook classification of the psyche. You cannot conclude from a meme caption alone that a particular person has a separate clinical category. The metaphor is useful for talking about feelings if you remember that real emotional life is more complicated than a cast of colored characters. In fan versions, the new character can stand not only for a feeling but also for a habit, a new task or an unexpected hobby.

In this sense, the template offers a temporary name for an experience rather than claiming to be a full psychological model. The viewer recognizes themselves in a specific episode, not in a clinical classification.

New characters for ordinary days

An example for a student: “Oh my god, is this a new emotion? — The joy of an email saying office hours were moved to tomorrow.” Here ordinary relief is presented as an unknown guest at headquarters. Another version: “When the neighbor starts drilling the exact minute you sit down to rest: meet Rage on Break.” The caption turns familiar irritation into the grand entrance of a character, using the contrast between the cartoon’s loud reaction and the mundane cause.

For a group chat: “I planned not to reply all day, and now I feel anxiety over an unread ‘ok.’” The new emotion here is a mix of uncertainty and awkwardness, and the joke rests on a recognizable digital situation. All of these wordings are newly invented; they are not names of official emotions from the film.

How to continue the format

First name the unexpected feeling or impulse, then present it as a new member of the team. A caption gains from precise detail: not just “a weird mood” but, say, the relief when a meeting you had agreed to gets canceled. If you draw your own character, a single distinctive color, pose or object is enough; for a caption on the frame itself, choose a short phrase so the characters’ expressions stay visible.