Yitong Shou, Manhao Guan

Researchers have developed a framework to mechanistically decode how large language models internally represent complex emotions, specifically social-comparison jealousy. Using representation engineering combined with appraisal theory, they isolated two psychological antecedents of jealousy in eight LLMs across Llama, Qwen, and Gemma families and found that models encode jealousy as a structured linear combination of these factors, broadly consistent with human psychology. The work demonstrates that toxic emotional states can be detected and surgically suppressed within model representations, opening a path toward representational monitoring for AI safety.