Mechanism

The affective state mechanisms are substrate-agnostic in their logical specification but substrate-aware in their implementation. The affective state field, the modulation layer, the update mechanics, the governance bounds, and the cross-primitive integrations are defined once, as a logical specification, and then adapted to the computational characteristics and constraints of each substrate type on which agents execute. The same affective primitive, a deterministic, policy-bounded modulation vector updated from structured observations, is realized across a plurality of substrate architectures without changing its logical definition.

What changes across substrates is not the affective semantics but the execution context: where the update function runs, how interaction-exposure contagion is computed, which contagion channels are available, and how aggressively contagion is attenuated. The disclosure enumerates four substrate types, centralized, federated, decentralized, and embodied, and describes for each how affective update and affective contagion adapt while the policy bounds and governance constraints described elsewhere in the chapter remain enforced.

Centralized Substrate

In a centralized deployment, all agents execute within a single computational facility or a tightly coupled cluster. The affective state update function is executed by the substrate's agent runtime, which has low-latency access to the agent's complete state, the policy configuration, and the structured observation stream. Affective contagion computations for interaction exposure are performed by a centralized contagion engine that maintains a real-time view of all participating agents' affective states within a given operational zone.

Because the runtime has direct, low-latency access to every component the update consumes, the centralized substrate enables precise affective update cycles and supports the full range of cross-primitive integrations: affect as input to confidence and forecasting, affect-modulated trust slope validation, biological signal coupling, affective contagion, and affect-modulated inference integration. It is the substrate against which the others are differentiated by what they can and cannot observe.

Federated Substrate

In a federated deployment, agents are distributed across multiple administrative domains that cooperate under shared governance agreements. Each federated node maintains its own agent runtime and executes affective state updates locally. Interaction exposure, the contagion channel that computes a weighted average of co-participating agents' affective states, is limited to agents within the same federated node, because a node has direct observability only of the agents it hosts.

Affective contagion across federation boundaries operates instead through the two channels that do not require continuous mutual observability: delegation inheritance, in which a parent's affective state is selectively transmitted to a child under a policy-defined inheritance mask, and broadcast propagation, in which a governance-authorized high-authority agent issues an affective signal to agents within its scope. Cross-node propagation receives additional attenuation to account for increased latency and reduced observability. Each federated node independently enforces the affective policy configuration for the agents in its domain, so the policy bounds and governance constraints hold uniformly even though the runtime is distributed.

Decentralized Substrate

In a fully decentralized deployment, agents execute on heterogeneous devices without a central coordinator. Affective state updates are executed locally on each device using only the structured observations available to the local execution environment. Affective contagion is limited to direct interaction channels: delegation inheritance between directly connected agents and peer-to-peer interaction exposure during coordinated operations.

Because there is no central coordinator, the zone-level spiral detection available in a centralized deployment, the monitoring process that tracks the moving average of each control field across all agents in a zone, is not available. To compensate for the absence of that backstop, the contagion damping factor is increased in decentralized deployments, so affective influence attenuates more quickly with each propagation hop. Each device independently enforces the policy-bounded update mechanism, and affective state mutations are recorded in the agent's local lineage, which is synchronized with the broader lineage infrastructure through the mechanisms described in the cross-referenced prior applications.

Embodied Substrate

In a robotics or physical-world deployment, agents execute within embedded systems that control physical actuators and receive sensory inputs from the physical environment. The affective state field receives structured observations derived from physical sensor data. For example, proximity sensor readings that indicate crowded or constrained operating conditions may elevate the agent's risk sensitivity, and successful physical task completions may reduce uncertainty sensitivity. The affective primitive is unchanged: these are admissible structured observations driving the same deterministic update function.

Two cross-primitive integrations are particularly relevant in embodied substrates. The biological signal coupling mechanism applies where the agent is in direct physical proximity to a human operator whose biological signals are observable through non-contact sensors. Affect-modulated trust slope validation governs how the embodied agent evaluates trust relationships with other agents or humans in its physical environment, with the agent's affective state influencing the caution with which it approaches delegation or cooperation in physical-world tasks where failure may have irreversible physical consequences.

What Stays Invariant Across Substrates

Across all four substrate types, the logical specification of affect does not change. The affective state field is the same structured modulation layer of named control fields. The update function is deterministic: given the same agent state, the same structured observations, and the same policy configuration, it produces the same output. Every update is a policy-bounded mutation, passing through the admissible-trigger check, the rate-limit clamp, and the range-bound clamp before it is recorded in lineage. The separation of concerns holds: affect modulates how the agent deliberates and never grants authority, validates truth, relaxes policy, or substitutes for trust slope validation.

What the substrate determines is the realization, not the rule: which runtime executes the update, which contagion channels are reachable, whether zone-level spiral detection is available, and how strongly contagion is damped. Because the policy bounds are enforced locally at each node or device, the governance properties survive the move from a single cluster to a federation, to a coordinator-free mesh, to an embedded controller.

Composition Through Migration

The affective state field is persisted with the agent across execution cycles, delegation events, and substrate migrations, so the agent's modulation state is not lost when the agent moves between execution environments or is serialized for transport. This persistence is what lets the substrate-agnostic specification compose with substrate-aware implementation: an agent carries its accumulated affective disposition with it, and the receiving substrate resumes updating that disposition under its own local realization of the same logical rules.

Because affective state is structurally integrated as the seventh field of the semantic agent schema rather than as metadata or an external overlay, its migration is governed by the same lineage tracking and policy enforcement that apply to every other field. Affective mutations are recorded in lineage abstractly, by observation type, update direction, and policy compliance status, which permits forensic reconstruction of an agent's affective trajectory across substrates without exposing absolute field values. The deterministic update function and the immutable lineage record together allow an agent's affective state at any historical point to be reconstructed by replaying recorded observations, regardless of which substrate the agent occupied when those observations were processed.

Disclosure Scope

The substrate deployment of the affective state field, comprising the substrate-agnostic logical specification of the affective state field, modulation layer, update mechanics, governance bounds, and cross-primitive integrations, together with its substrate-aware implementation across centralized, federated, decentralized, and embodied substrate types, is disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). The disclosure includes the centralized contagion engine and full cross-primitive support of the centralized substrate; the local update execution, node-scoped interaction exposure, and delegation-and-broadcast cross-boundary contagion with additional attenuation of the federated substrate; the local update execution, direct-channel-only contagion, and increased contagion damping in the absence of central spiral detection of the decentralized substrate; and the physical-sensor-derived observations, biological signal coupling, and affect-modulated trust slope validation of the embodied substrate.

The disclosure does not encompass affective representations that are not structurally integrated as a governed agent field, that are not updated by a deterministic policy-bounded function, or whose governance bounds are not independently enforced at the executing substrate. The boundary is the invariance property: the affective semantics, determinism, policy bounds, and separation of concerns are preserved across every substrate type, while only the execution context, available contagion channels, and damping adapt to the substrate.