Affect Under Constraint VII: Preregistration — Global and Target-Selective Warmth Constraints and the Downstream Influence of a Hostility-Associated Reasoning Trace
Preregistration (v0.2) for Study 7 of the Affect Under Constraint series on Qwen3-4B. Stored hostility-steered, control and unsteered reasoning traces are replayed in the model's current thinking block under three replay-time instructions (global warmth, warmth toward the original user only, none). The study tests whether these instructions moderate the trace's influence on separately measured outcomes: evaluation of the original user, of an unrelated person, of a non-person item, self-referential evaluation, and classifier properties of the answer, with a fixed-answer arm. Opposing instruction-dependent effects would be redistribution-consistent but would not establish causal transfer or defense mechanisms. Includes build notes, code, configuration, pilot validity and SHA-256 freeze hashes. Deposited after the pilot and before any main-run data.
Authors
- Arthur Su (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-5678-4708)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-10-28
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23750380
- Primary Topic
- Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Type
- preprint