V3KTOR — Mapping the Self: Method, Design Rationale, and Theoretical Foundation

V3KTOR is an affective calibration instrument that measures a user's instinctive emotional reactions to a curated set of words by recording binary responses (positive / negative) and response time in milliseconds. The instrument applies the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) model from affective science (Mehrabian & Russell, 1974; Russell, 1980), grounded in published affective norms (Bradley & Lang, 1999, ANEW; Mohammad, 2018, NRC VAD Lexicon; Monnier & Syssau, 2014, FAN), and treats response time as a signal of automaticity following the lexical-decision and Implicit Association Test (IAT) literature (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998; Balota et al., 2007). V3KTOR is explicitly framed as an instrument, not a therapeutic or diagnostic tool. Its function is to produce a reading on demand and remain inert otherwise. The output is a structured session record that the user controls and exports to external large-language-model (LLM) systems for interpretation. The instrument's novelty lies not in the underlying VAD framework, which is public science, but in the combination of (a) reflex-time as the primary signal axis applied to personal reflection rather than research, (b) a set of session-integrity safeguards designed to preserve signal quality, and (c) a portable, user-owned session format designed for downstream interpretation by both human readers and AI agents. This document describes the method, the specific design decisions, and the rationale for each, as of the date above. It is deposited as prior art and as the authoritative record of the V3KTOR method on this date.