Whether, Not Which: Mechanistic Interpretability Reveals Dissociable Affect Reception and Emotion Categorization in LLMs

Large language models appear to develop internal representations of emotion -- "emotion circuits," "emotion neurons," and structured emotional manifolds have been reported across multiple model families. But every study making these claims uses stimuli signalled by explicit emotion keywords, leaving a fundamental question unanswered: do these circuits detect genuine emotional meaning, or do they detect the word "devastated"? We present the first clinical validity test of emotion circuit claims u

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ethics.ai (15 March 2026), “Whether, Not Which: Mechanistic Interpretability Reveals Dissociable Affect Reception and Emotion Categorization in LLMs,” evidence record 7216, https://ethics.ai/record/7216 (originally published by arXiv).

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