Mechanism
Pseudonymous emotional operation is the privacy model under which the affective state field operates. The affective state field is a seventh structural field of the semantic agent schema: a deterministic, policy-bounded modulation vector that shapes how the agent weighs alternatives, tolerates ambiguity, persists under partial failure, and escalates under constraint pressure. Under the disclosed privacy model, this affective state is an internal modulation parameter. It is not disclosed to external observers, other agents, or human operators except through the behavioral effects it produces. The agent's delegation choices, execution timing, and candidate selection patterns are observable; the affective state values that shaped those behaviors are not.
The model rests on a distinction the specification draws explicitly between behavioral influence and state disclosure. External entities observe behavior and may infer that the agent is in a particular affective configuration, but the affective state values themselves are not exposed through any API, protocol, or interface. The same internal references that consume the affective state, the agent's modulation logic, the governance gate, the confidence computation, and the forecasting engine, operate inside the agent's execution pipeline and do not produce external disclosures.
Affective State Is Not Externally Readable
No external entity can directly query an agent's affective state field values. This is the central invariant of the privacy model. The governance gate records whether the agent's affective state was within policy bounds at the time of execution, which is a binary compliance record, but it does not record the specific field values in any externally accessible log. An observer therefore learns that the agent acted, and that it acted within policy, without learning the named control field magnitudes (uncertainty sensitivity, risk sensitivity, novelty appetite, and the rest) that conditioned the action.
The specification is careful about what an observer can recover. It permits inference: an external party watching delegation patterns and timing may conclude the agent is in a cautious or exploratory configuration. What it forecloses is direct read access to the values. The affective state is referenced internally and exposed only through its behavioral consequences.
Lineage Records Reference Affective Mutations Abstractly
Every mutation to the affective state field is recorded in the agent's lineage, but the lineage records the mutation abstractly. Each affective state mutation entry records the observation type, the update direction (increase or decrease on each affected field), and the policy compliance status. The lineage records do not include the absolute field values, the raw observations, or, in the case of biological coupling, the specific biological signal data.
This abstraction level is what reconciles auditability with privacy. Lineage auditing can verify that the agent's affective evolution followed policy-compliant paths, that updates came from admissible triggers, stayed within rate limits, and remained inside policy bounds, without revealing the agent's moment-to-moment emotional state. The audit confirms the shape of the trajectory, not its absolute coordinates.
Biological Coupling Preserves User Privacy
When the agent's affective state receives modulation derived from a human user's biological signals, the privacy model extends to the user. The biological signal coupling pipeline transforms raw biological signals, such as heart rate variability, galvanic skin response, vocal prosody, typing dynamics, gaze patterns, or postural micro-movements, into abstract state descriptors before they influence the agent's affective state. The raw biometric data is not stored as such; it is reduced to descriptors characterizing the user's condition along dimensions like stress, engagement, and fatigue, and the specification states these abstract descriptors cannot be reverse-engineered to recover the underlying signals.
The agent's lineage records the coupling event, tagging the observation type as biological-coupling, without recording the underlying physiological data. The user's biological state is never persisted in the agent's memory field, transmitted to other agents, or recorded in any externally accessible data store. The user's privacy is protected by the same structural mechanism that protects the agent's affective privacy: internal state is not externally disclosed.
Per-Identity Scoping of Affective State
The affective state field supports pseudonymous operation consistent with the pseudonymous identity framework of the cross-referenced prior applications. An agent operating under a pseudonymous identity maintains its affective state as part of its pseudonymous persona. The load-bearing rule is compartmentalization: when an agent transitions between pseudonymous identities, for example operating under different scoped identities for different application domains, the affective state field is scoped to each identity. Affective state accumulated under one pseudonymous identity does not leak to another pseudonymous identity.
This scoping preserves the compartmentalization properties of the pseudonymous identity framework. The agent retains continuity of affective modulation within an identity, so its accumulated execution experience continues to shape its deliberation, while the boundary between identities prevents the affective trajectory under one persona from becoming a correlator that links it to another.
Multi-Agent Contagion Without State Disclosure
When agents participate in multi-agent operations, the affective contagion mechanisms operate without revealing the absolute affective state values of any participant. The interaction-exposure computation is performed using relative measures, whether an agent's risk sensitivity is higher or lower than a reference baseline, rather than absolute values. Agents can therefore influence one another's deliberation dynamics through structured contagion channels without disclosing their internal modulation state to one another.
The specification frames this as contagion operating at the level of behavioral influence, not state disclosure. An agent's affective configuration can propagate its conditioning effect to a counterpart, subject to the policy bounds, rate limits, and damping that govern contagion generally, while the counterpart never reads the originating agent's field values. The privacy invariant that holds at the external boundary also holds between cooperating agents.
Deterministic Forensic Reconstruction
The privacy model does not sacrifice accountability. Because the affective state update function is deterministic and every affective mutation event is recorded in the immutable lineage, the agent's affective state at any historical point is reconstructable by replaying the deterministic update function over the sequence of recorded observations from the lineage. Each update is deterministic and each observation is recorded, so the reconstruction produces the exact affective state vector that existed at the queried timestamp.
This enables compliance auditing and regulatory review without requiring persistent storage of moment-to-moment affective state values. When a governance event requires post-hoc review, for instance determining the agent's modulation configuration at the time of a disputed decision, the configuration is recovered on demand from the lineage record and the update function specification, both of which are preserved as part of the agent's cryptographic provenance. The system thus keeps moment-to-moment affective values out of accessible logs while still being able to produce them exactly when governance legitimately requires it.
Disclosure Scope
Pseudonymous emotional operation, comprising the affective state field as an internal modulation parameter that is not externally readable, the abstract lineage recording of affective mutations by observation type, update direction, and compliance status rather than absolute value, the transformation of biological signals into non-reversible abstract descriptors that are not persisted, the per-identity scoping of affective state under pseudonymous identities such that accumulated state does not leak across identities, the relative-measure contagion that influences deliberation without disclosing state, and the deterministic forensic reconstruction of historical affective state from the immutable lineage, is disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). This article describes that disclosed mechanism. The scope extends to centralized, federated, decentralized, and embodied substrates, and to single, multiple, and scoped pseudonymous identities, provided the affective state remains internally referenced and externally undisclosed except through its behavioral effects.
