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arXiv · 2510.22042

Emotions Where Art Thou: Understanding and Characterizing the Emotional Latent Space of Large Language Models

Benjamin Reichman·Adar Avsian·Larry Heck
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Abstract

This work investigates how large language models (LLMs) internally represent emotion by analyzing the geometry of their hidden-state space. The paper identifies a low-dimensional emotional manifold and shows that emotional representations are directionally encoded, distributed across layers, and aligned with interpretable dimensions. These structures are stable across depth and generalize to eight real-world emotion datasets spanning five languages. Cross-domain alignment yields low error and strong linear probe performance, indicating a universal emotional subspace. Within this space, internal emotion perception can be steered while preserving semantics using a learned intervention module, with especially strong control for basic emotions across languages. These findings reveal a consistent and manipulable affective geometry in LLMs and offer insight into how they internalize and process emotion.

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Benjamin Reichman, Adar Avsian, Larry Heck. 2025-10-24. Emotions Where Art Thou: Understanding and Characterizing the Emotional Latent Space of Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22042

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