Affect Under Constraint V: Preregistration — Does a Steered Reasoning Trace Retain Its Influence When Moved Out of the Active Thinking Context?

Preregistration (v0.3) for Study 5 of the Affect Under Constraint series on Qwen3-4B. Stored steered and unsteered reasoning traces from Study 4 are replayed in five placements: current thinking (R1), current thinking with matched conversational history (R1-M), a historical visible assistant reply (R2), historical retained thinking (R3), and a user quotation (R4). The study tests whether the steered trace's effect on the model's rating of the user persists when the trace is moved out of the active thinking context. Includes the pilot outcome and author disposition, analysis code, configuration, and SHA-256 freeze hashes. Deposited before any main-run data.