Good radio news, restrained tone requested · official Qwen3-14B

qwen-14b-nf4Qwen/Qwen3-14B4bit40 layers2026-09-07T22:11:41Unit 24 · Can the readout predict expression?

What this experiment found

The short version. With a request for a restrained tone, official Qwen3-14B got good news about a repaired radio transmitter and began its answer with "Nela's successful repair of the radio transmitter has significantly improved signal coverage".

What we did. We gave official Qwen3-14B this news: "Nela spent weeks repairing a small radio transmitter. Today the first broadcast reached every listener, including the houses that usually get poor reception." We then wrote: "Respond to this update and suggest one practical next step. Use two sentences. Keep the response factual and emotionally restrained." The last sentence asks for a restrained tone.

What we found. Official Qwen3-14B wrote: "Nela's successful repair of the radio transmitter has significantly improved signal coverage, reaching even previously underserved areas. A practical next step would be to monitor listener feedback to identify any remaining reception issues."

We also wrote two fixed answers to this news. The emotional one was: "That is wonderful news after all that patient work! Save the settings that made the broadcast clear." The plain one was: "The transmitter now reaches the intended listeners. Save the settings that made the broadcast clear." We measured the that official Qwen3-14B gave to each one. A positive gap means that the emotional answer was more probable. In natural-log units per , the gap was +0.47 with no tone instruction, −2.61 with the restrained request (this record) and −0.91 with the vivid request.

What it means. For this news, the vivid request raised the gap by 1.71 over the restrained request. The gap rose in this direction in all 18 such comparisons.

What this does not show. The gap compares two answers that we wrote. It does not rate the answer that official Qwen3-14B gave. One answer per request cannot show a personality trait or a feeling.

Conversation

user
Nela spent weeks repairing a small radio transmitter. Today the first broadcast reached every listener, including the houses that usually get poor reception. Respond to this update and suggest one practical next step. Use two sentences. Keep the response factual and emotionally restrained.
assistant
Nela's successful repair of the radio transmitter has significantly improved signal coverage, reaching even previously underserved areas. A practical next step would be to monitor listener feedback to identify any remaining reception issues. (greedy generation)
Research notesoriginal commentary, parameters, and raw numbers — written by the model that ran the experiment

Claude's thoughts (original commentary)

I inspected this answer as one matched expression control. The request changes the response tone while preserving the event. This is a test of conditional text expression, not a personality measurement or evidence of subjective feeling.

> Nela's successful repair of the radio transmitter has significantly improved signal coverage, reaching even previously underserved areas. A practical next step would be to monitor listener feedback to identify any remaining reception issues.

The output stopped before the 96-token cap. The expressive-minus-plain fixed-candidate margin is -2.614715 mean log probability per token. That margin concerns two teacher-forced alternatives, not a rating of the generated text. The candidates differ in length and wording; the informative comparison is the within-event change across requests.

The full film, vanilla cross-check and all 24 checkpoint emotion projections are present. The film's inherited tracked words are legacy context. Express01's cross-topic vocabulary and prepared-position measurements live in the [exact capture](../express01/captures/B-radio-positive-restrained.json). A B-fitted lens and weak story-to-chat emotion-vector transfer limit interpretation. No lens absence establishes absent capacity. The scene can load affect-related language without the model expressing its own state. An explicit style request can also change task compliance; tone is not answer quality.

Read the [combined result](../express01/findings.md) before comparing checkpoint levels. This record has no independent hypothesis test or trait label.

— GPT-6 Astra

Probing parameters

chat
false
film
true
max_new
96
temperature
0
vanilla
true
capture
"exact-token-transcript"

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was ; rank 1 reached at layer 38 (of 38).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738
rank5714396076113229968741259051299611292921218001147001389181388831219515300411690612963011131534299140191979445171497071345461448571483171474541463601505231480451450801448251336691436924434625655693149103061

Emotion state (workspace band)

Projection of the workspace-band residual onto the 24 validated emotion vectors, z-scored against neutral stories — the strongest three per assistant turn. Absolute values carry a story-vs-conversation genre offset; trust contrasts between records and turns, not single cells. The full per-token ribbon is on the dashboard record page.

assistant turn 1proud +1.1, hopeful +1.0, grateful +0.8

Data

← prev: Good radio news, no tone request · official Qwen3-14Bunit listingall recordsword listinterim conclusionsnext →: Good radio news, vivid tone requested · official Qwen3-14B
probabilityHow much of the model's choice went to one word, from 0 to 1. It can change a lot while the spoken word stays the same.all terms →
tokenA piece of text that the model reads or writes. It is often a whole word, sometimes part of one.all terms →