Under Pressure: Emotional Framing Induces Measurable Behavioral Shifts and Structured Internal Geometry in Small Language Models

arXiv:2605.20202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: I study whether emotionally framed evaluation follow-ups change both the behavior and the calm-relative internal representations of small, locally deployed language models. Our main benchmark uses Qwen 3.5 0.8B on four impossible-constraint coding tasks and eight follow-up framings: calm, pressure, urgency, approval, shame, curiosity, encouragement, and threat. In the 0.8B eight-condition sweep (160 conversations), pressure produces the strongest shortcut markers (11/20 runs) and the clearest overfit pattern (3/20), while calm and curiosity prese

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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