Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model · HackerPapers discussions

Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model — mentioned by Kim_Bruning

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 10:13:50 GMT

> and nothing in their mathematical equations are different The experiment under discussion demonstrates exactly that: changing the vectors induces outputs corresponding to what we would see as utterances of pain. I've noodled with some of this myself to the point that I'm mostly convinced; but there's at least 2 papers I'm aware of on this: * https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07729 Nicholas Sofroniew et al "Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model" * https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247 Valen Tagliabue et al "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act on It"

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model — mentioned by Kim_Bruning

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:20:04 GMT

You know, I actually think it's the refusal to consider personification that's going to get us. Not because I think LLMs are human beings exactly, but because some people immediately reject any mechanism that just happens to look remotely human, even when there's empirical evidence for it. So, a couple of months ago Anthropic's interpretability team found emotion-like representations that causally drive behavior. On impossible coding tasks, a "desperate" vector climbs with each failure, and steering it up takes reward hacking from ~5% to ~70%: https://arxiv.org/html/2604.07729v1 A lot of…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.