Mechanism
Affective inheritance is the mechanism by which a parent agent's affective state is selectively transmitted to a child agent at the moment of delegation. The affective state field, introduced as a seventh structural field of the semantic agent schema, is a deterministic, policy-bounded modulation layer comprising named control fields such as uncertainty sensitivity, ambiguity tolerance, novelty appetite, persistence under partial failure, escalation under time pressure, risk sensitivity, and cooperation disposition. When a parent agent delegates a task to a child agent, the disclosure provides for the parent's accumulated modulation context to be passed forward under scoped inheritance rules defined by the applicable policy configuration, so that the child receives relevant disposition from the parent's experience without inheriting the parent's full affective state.
The goal of scoping is stated plainly in the disclosure: the child should receive the modulation context that is relevant to the delegated task and should not inherit modulation dimensions that are irrelevant to that task. Inheritance is therefore not a copy of the parent's affective vector. It is a per-field selection and combination governed by a mask, a blending function, a depth limit, and a return channel, all of which are policy-defined and all of which are recorded in lineage.
The Delegation Inheritance Mask
Upon initiating a delegation event, the parent agent's affective state vector is evaluated against a delegation inheritance mask specified by the policy configuration. The mask defines, for each named control field, one of three dispositions: the field is inherited, meaning its value is transmitted to the child; the field is excluded, meaning it is not transmitted and the child uses its own baseline for that field; or the field is attenuated, meaning it is transmitted with a scaling factor between zero and one.
The mask is defined per delegation type. The disclosure gives the example of a delegation for exploratory search, in which the policy may inherit the parent's novelty appetite at full strength while attenuating the parent's risk sensitivity, so that the child is permitted broader exploration than the parent would itself undertake. This per-type, per-field structure is what allows the same parent to transmit different affective context to different children depending on the nature of the work being delegated.
Blending With the Child's Prior State
The inherited affective state is injected into the child agent's affective state field at the moment of delegation instantiation. If the child already carries a prior affective state, the inherited state is combined with it using a policy-defined blending function. In an embodiment, the blending function is a weighted average of the inherited value and the child's prior value, governed by an inheritance weight specified by policy. A higher weight biases the child toward the inherited disposition, and a lower weight preserves more of the child's own accumulated state.
The blending operation is recorded in both the parent's and the child's lineage records. This establishes a traceable affective provenance chain: the record of which dimensions were inherited, which were excluded, which were attenuated, and how the inherited values were blended with the child's prior state is preserved as part of the agents' cryptographic provenance, consistent with the requirement that every mutation to an affective state field be auditable.
Depth-Limited Inheritance
Affective inheritance is depth-limited. The policy configuration specifies a maximum delegation depth at which affective inheritance is permitted. Beyond this depth, child agents instantiate with their own baseline affective state and do not receive inherited modulation from ancestors. The disclosure states the rationale directly: the depth limitation prevents affective state from propagating through arbitrarily deep delegation chains, where the modulation context would otherwise become stale, irrelevant, or excessively diluted.
The depth limit is a property of the policy configuration rather than a fixed architectural constant. The disclosure specifies the existence of a maximum permitted depth and the behavior at and beyond that depth, but does not prescribe a particular numeric value; the value is set by the applicable policy for the deployment.
The Return Channel
Inheritance is not one-directional. Upon completion of a delegated task, the child agent's terminal affective state may be partially transmitted back to the parent agent under a return inheritance mask. This return channel enables the parent to incorporate affective feedback from the child's execution experience. The disclosure gives the example of a child that encountered unexpected difficulty during the delegated task, elevating its uncertainty sensitivity: under the return mask, the parent may receive an attenuated version of that signal.
The return inheritance mask is independently configured by policy and is not required to be symmetric with the delegation inheritance mask. The set of fields transmitted forward to the child at delegation need not be the same set transmitted back to the parent at completion, and the attenuation applied in each direction is configured independently. Like the forward inheritance event, the return update is a policy-bounded mutation and is recorded in lineage.
Inheritance as a Directed Contagion Channel
The disclosure situates delegation inheritance within a broader model of affective contagion across populations of interacting agents. Delegation inheritance is described as a directed contagion channel operating along the delegation graph from parent to child and, upon task completion, from child to parent. It sits alongside two other channels: interaction exposure, where agents in a coordinated operation are exposed to one another's affective states, and broadcast propagation, where high-authority agents may issue affective signals within their operational scope.
Because inheritance is a contagion channel, it is subject to the same governance bounds the disclosure imposes to prevent runaway emotional spirals. Updates derived from contagion pass through a contagion damping factor strictly less than one, so affective influence attenuates with each propagation step and the influence of a distant originating agent becomes negligible after a number of hops. Per-field aggregate contagion limits cap the total shift any field may absorb from contagion observations within a time window. These bounds operate in addition to the depth limit and the per-field mask that govern inheritance specifically.
Inheritance Does Not Bypass Governance
Affective inheritance transmits disposition, not authority. The affective state field cannot create authority an agent does not possess, cannot bypass policy constraints, and is not an input to the governance gate that determines execution admissibility. An inherited disposition modulates how a child agent deliberates, for example how it weighs candidates, how readily it escalates, or how broadly it explores, but it does not determine whether the child is permitted to act. A child that inherits elevated cooperation disposition and suppressed risk sensitivity still cannot delegate outside its policy-defined delegation scope.
Every inheritance event, forward and return, is a policy-bounded mutation. The update must respect the admissible triggers, rate limits, and range bounds that govern affective updates generally, and the policy specifies which entities may initiate updates, with policy-defined delegation parents among the permitted initiators. The disclosure also provides that an agent exhibiting volatility may have its outgoing transmission suppressed: if an agent is routed to a quarantine state on a volatility condition, its delegation authority is suspended specifically to prevent it from propagating an unstable affective state to child agents through inheritance.
Disclosure Scope
Affective inheritance in delegation chains, comprising the delegation inheritance mask with its per-field inherit, exclude, or attenuate disposition defined per delegation type, the injection of inherited state at delegation instantiation, the policy-weighted blending function that combines inherited state with the child's prior state, the depth limitation beyond which children instantiate at their own baseline, the independently configured return inheritance mask that transmits the child's terminal state back to the parent upon completion, and the recording of the resulting affective provenance chain in the lineage of both agents, is disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). This article describes that disclosed mechanism and its placement within the affective contagion model, where delegation inheritance is a directed parent-to-child and child-to-parent contagion channel bounded by contagion damping, aggregate contagion limits, the depth limit, and the separation of affective modulation from governance authority. The scope extends to the substrate embodiments in which inheritance operates, including centralized, federated, decentralized, and embodied deployments, with cross-node propagation mediated by delegation events under additional attenuation.
