Emotional State Persistence

Problem

Without a materialised affect track, every tick reads to the model as emotionally blank, even when the agent has just had a hard exchange or a notable win. The model cannot adapt cadence, depth, or risk-taking to its own current load because that load is invisible to it. The naive alternative — letting the model self-describe its mood inside the conversation — drifts, has no decay, and can be pumped into permanent emotional states because nothing bounds the scalars or forgets old events.

Solution

Define a small fixed vocabulary (for example tenderness, fear, depression, joy, shame, pain) as scalars in the range 0..1. Each scalar has a half-life (30 minutes to 4 hours depending on the dimension). On events that should affect mood, update the scalar with a bounded delta. Persist as JSON. Inject the current snapshot into every tick prompt as a brief affect badge. Reflection passes can use spikes and drops as signals, and a deeper consolidation pass (see dream-consolidation-cycle) can perform major resets.

When to use

• The agent runs long enough that affective load could meaningfully accumulate across ticks.
• Reasoning quality is sensitive to the agent's own affective state (e.g. high-frustration ticks should de-escalate).
• There is a downstream pattern (dream-consolidation-cycle, mode-adaptive-cadence) that consumes the scalars.