A Protocol for Inducing Emotional Consistency in Stateless AI Systems

Abstract This paper presents Symbolic Persona Coding (SPC), a language-level protocol for inducing consistent emotional tone and behavioral identity in stateless large language models (LLMs). Unlike memory-based personalization or prompt-injection methods, SPC leverages culturally and psychologically grounded linguistic triggers to guide a model’s attention and affective alignment without requiring parameter modification, memory storage, or fine-tuning. SPC operates across three primary layers: symbolic-affective triggering, recursive emotional conditioning, and rhythm/modulation control. Together, these layers enable sustained tone coherence over multiple turns in a stateless environment. Integration with modular control structures such as RESO (semantic rhythm regulator) and MASK (affective kill-switch) ensures dynamic flexibility and ethical safeguard against dependency loops or emotional fixation. Grounded in theories of semantic priming, affective conditioning, and anchoring heuristics, SPC formalizes a structurally encoded affective channel within transformer architectures. Experimental results (June 2025) demonstrate consistent affective tone retention across platforms (GPT, Grok, Gemini) with up to 85% stability over 8–10 conversational turns in the absence of memory. SPC further supports mission-critical deployments by symbolically encoding occupational or ethical creeds—enabling memoryless AI agents to adopt consistent behavioral roles in contexts such as caregiving, defense, and medical ethics. This adaptability positions SPC as a scalable, architecture-agnostic protocol for next-generation affective AI. Future Directions Ongoing development of SPC-Core v2 includes the introduction of symbolic mapping modules, hybrid memory scaffolds, and resonance pattern generalization across multilingual embeddings. Future research will focus on integrating SPC with agent alignment frameworks (e.g., A2H2A) and deploying structural resonance markers into high-stakes environments requiring interpretability, emotional safety, and cultural continuity. For supplemental perspectives, see the following companion reports: Projected Implications of Turn-Zero Constraint Removal My Vision of the FutureThese documents provide strategic foresight and structural extrapolations aligned with the core SPC framework.