Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model
Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-relevant behavior. We find internal representations of emotion concepts, which encode the broad concept of a particular emotion and generalize across contexts and behaviors it might be linked to. These representations track the operative emotion concept at a given token position in a conversation, activating in accordance wi
Record details
Published: 9 April 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Safety & alignment · Finance, VC & PE
Retrieved: 14 July 2026
Related evidence
These records share source-supplied organisations, an exact publisher byline, automatic topics or regions. The reason is shown on every link; related does not mean supporting, agreeing with or verifying this record.
Does Claude's Constitution Have a Culture?
arXiv · 30 March 2026
When AI Tells You What You Want to Hear: Sycophantic Behavior of Large Language Models in Dementia Care Settings
arXiv · 13 April 2026
UK AISI Alignment Evaluation Case-Study
arXiv · 1 April 2026
Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models
arXiv · 30 March 2026
Frame Entrepreneurs in an AI Agent Community: Concentrated Identity-Claim Production on Moltbook
arXiv · 29 April 2026
Invisible Orchestrators Suppress Protective Behavior and Dissociate Power-Holders: Safety Risks in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
arXiv · 17 March 2026
How to cite this record
ethics.ai (9 April 2026), “Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model,” evidence record 6163, https://ethics.ai/record/6163 (originally published by arXiv).
Use and limitations
This page is a stable index and citation surface for a source record. ethics.ai did not author the underlying report and has not independently verified every claim. Automatic topics may be imperfect. For consequential use, quote and cite the original publisher.