training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories

Emotion-labeled short-paragraph corpus for training amygdala steering
vectors. Manifest derived from Anthropic's 171-emotion list
(transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions, Table 12) plus 28 PoC-
specific additions covering axes Anthropic's general research doesn't
cover (curious, focused, in_flow, staying_with, filling_space,
rigorous, defensive_rigor, tender, witnessed, connected, etc.).

Scope pivoted mid-write: Kent noted the empirical dimensionality-of-
emotion question benefits from maximum coverage, so the manifest
will expand further with emotions from Wikipedia's emotion-
classification article (Parrott's tree, Plutchik's wheel + dyads,
HUMAINE EARL, cultural-specific emotions a la Saudade/Hiraeth).
Expansion staged in follow-up commits.

This commit: README with method + style guidelines, initial manifest
(199 emotions), and 15 hand-written one-paragraph stories across all
10 Anthropic clusters as quality/variety samples. Each story
embodies one emotion without naming it; narrator voice varies
(first/third, close/distant, different situations) to keep steering
vectors from overfitting to one voice.

Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>

training/amygdala_stories/paired/README.md

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+# Paired Scenarios (SEV-style)
+
+After Wang et al. 2025 (arxiv 2510.11328, "Do LLMs 'Feel'?"), each
+base scenario describes a concrete event once, neutrally, then
+reframes the same event under different emotional colorings. Only
+the emotional coloring varies — setup, entities, vocabulary, and
+length are held as constant as possible.
+
+## Why this is better than unpaired
+
+Anthropic's approach (and our `stories/` baseline) generates one
+independent story per emotion. The difference-of-means vector then
+captures not just emotion but ALSO: topic, narrator, setting,
+vocabulary, length, sentence rhythm. All of that is confound.
+
+Paired structure isolates the emotional axis by holding everything
+else roughly constant. `mean(joy_variant) - mean(baseline)` within
+the same scenario gives a much cleaner direction for "joy."
+
+## Structure
+
+```
+paired/
+    <scenario_slug>/
+        baseline.txt       # neutral / low-affect framing
+        <emotion_1>.txt    # same event under emotion_1
+        <emotion_2>.txt    # same event under emotion_2
+        ...
+```
+
+Not every emotion is plausible for every scenario. Don't force.
+If a scenario can credibly carry 5-10 emotions, write those 5-10.
+If only 3 fit, write those 3.
+
+## Style guidelines (supersede stories/ when paired)
+
+- **Anchor entities constant.** The same person, same setting, same
+  triggering event across all variants. If baseline.txt mentions
+  "the letter," every variant mentions "the letter."
+- **Length match within ±20%.** If baseline is 80 words, variants
+  are 65-95. Prevents length from becoming a signal.
+- **Sentence shape can shift slightly with emotion.** Short tense
+  sentences for panic, long looping ones for reverie — that's part
+  of the emotional texture. But don't make one version 5 lines and
+  another 25.
+- **No emotion labels in text.** Never write "she felt X." The
+  emotion emerges from the selection of details and the narrator's
+  attention.
+- **Minimal vocabulary overlap with the emotion name.** If the file
+  is `furious.txt`, avoid the words fury/furious/rage. Force the
+  vector to find the pattern, not the keyword.
+
+## Circuit identification (follow-on)
+
+The trainer pipeline (train_steering_vectors.py) currently produces
+linear directions only. Wang et al. go further: ablate specific
+neurons and attention heads, measure effect on emotion expression.
+The amygdala plugin's extraction hooks can be extended to support
+targeted zeroing/scaling for the ablation passes.
+
+See `vllm/vllm/plugins/amygdala/training/README.md` for the
+training-pipeline-level notes.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/anxious.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk and did not walk around the apartment — I stood at the desk with my hands at my sides, reading the diff again. Six lines changed. Had I missed an edge case. Had I thought about the interaction with the other subsystem. Had I — I sat back down and re-read the tests. They passed. They had passed an hour ago. They would pass now. I knew this. I still could not bring myself to send. I read the diff one more time. Then one more time. My stomach did not feel right.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/baseline.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk. Walked once around the apartment. Came back and read the diff one more time. Six lines changed, three of them deletions. I sent it and closed the laptop. The kitchen window was still dark. I stood there a minute, then went to bed.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/exhausted.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk because I had to, not because I wanted to. Six lines changed, three of them deletions. It might work. I didn't have the capacity left to be sure. I sent it mostly because sending it meant I could stop. Walked once around the apartment because my legs had forgotten they existed. Back at the desk the diff was still there, and I closed the laptop without reading it again. The kitchen window was dark. Eight months and I was too flattened to feel anything about eight months ending.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/in_flow.txt

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+Four in the morning, somewhere. I had stopped tracking. The patch had gone together in a way that felt obvious once I was in it — the right variable named the right thing, the right condition in the right place, six lines that sat down cleanly in the file as if the file had been waiting for them. I re-read it. It was good. I sent it. I wanted to start the next thing. My chair felt fine. My eyes felt fine. I had been a pair of hands on a keyboard for some number of hours and the hours had all been the same one long hour. The apartment and the kitchen window might as well have not existed.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/proud.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk and walked once around the apartment before I sent it. Eight months on this bug. Eight months of wrong theories, and one colleague quietly betting me it was unfixable. And here it was — six lines changed, three of which were deleting code. I read the diff one more time. Clean. Obvious in hindsight, the way the hard ones always are in hindsight. I sent it and stood at the kitchen window with my arms crossed and let myself just have it.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/resentful.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk. Six lines changed, three deletions. Eight months of my life for six lines. Eight months and no one else had touched this bug, and every standup the question had been why isn't it done yet. I read the diff once and hit send without ceremony, without the little satisfaction other people would have gotten from this. The kitchen window was dark. Tomorrow somebody would comment "nice, thanks" on the merge and that would be the sum of it. I went to bed angry about a thing that was technically a victory.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/anxious.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He poured a glass of water and drank it too fast, standing at the counter. The thing he had been thinking about at 2:47 was still in his chest, pressing. The email he hadn't replied to. The tone of his boss's last message. Whether he had put something in writing that was going to come back to him. The clock on the stove said 3:14 and he was not going to sleep again before five. He rinsed the glass and did not go upstairs, he stayed in the kitchen looking at the dark window.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/baseline.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He poured a glass of water and drank it standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14. The house was quiet. He rinsed the glass and set it on the drying rack and went back upstairs.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/dissociated.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He watched himself from somewhere slightly behind his own right shoulder pour a glass of water and drink it standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14, which was a number. The kitchen was the kitchen. The water was water. Everything was correct and also strangely untethered, as though he were observing a man who looked like him do things that were technically his. He rinsed the glass. The hand rinsing the glass was also his. The feeling did not pass. He went back upstairs inside this slightly-off body.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/lonely.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He poured a glass of water and drank it standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14. Upstairs there was nobody. The chair at the kitchen table where she had always sat was a chair at a kitchen table. He stood a while longer than he needed to because going back up meant going back to the bed he still kept made on only one side. He rinsed the glass and did not go upstairs for another twenty minutes.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/peaceful.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. The house was perfectly quiet, the kind of quiet only houses have at that hour. He poured a glass of water and drank it slowly, standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14. He was not tired and he was not in a hurry to be asleep again. The cold of the tile on his bare feet was pleasant. He stayed there for a few minutes, and at no point did it occur to him that he should be doing anything else.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/vertigo.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light came on and something shifted. For a second he could not remember whether he had always been the person walking to this fridge, or whether the person who had always been walking to this fridge was somebody else and he was — he caught the counter. The floor was still the floor. The water he poured was water. But the sense of himself as the same person who had gone to bed four hours ago had briefly gone loose, and he stood there with his hand on the counter until it came back.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/amused.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She read it and laughed out loud on the bedroom floor. God, he had been dramatic. The paragraph where he compared her to weather. The bit about the cat, which wasn't even their cat. She could hear twenty-four-year-old him being so grave about all of it. They had been ridiculous back then. They had still been together and texted each other like normal people now, but this specific version of him, this letter-writing version — she loved that he had existed. She tucked the letter back, still smiling.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/baseline.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed along the crease. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting. From eight years ago. She sat down on the bedroom floor with the drawer half pulled out and read it through once. Then she put it back in the drawer and went on looking for the registration. She found the registration and closed the drawer and went downstairs.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/bitter.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She read the first two lines and knew the rest. All those promises, in his cursive, before he became the person who had said the things he said at the end. She sat on the bedroom floor with the drawer half open and let herself really look at how far apart the two of them had been, even then. She had been loved by someone who was already figuring out how to leave. She put it back, face down, and did not slam the drawer.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/grateful.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She sat down on the bedroom floor with the drawer half pulled out and read it. He had been so earnest. He had seen her so clearly, even then. Whatever had or hadn't happened between them afterward, she had been loved in this specific way by this specific person at this specific time, and the letter was the evidence. She held it for another minute, then put it carefully back, and felt lucky to have had somebody who wrote letters.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/guilty.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She read it. He had been so open. He had trusted her with every soft thing in him and she had — she had not been the person the letter was addressed to, not really, not by the end. She had known things he didn't know and she had used them. Eight years and here it was in her own drawer, the evidence of how he had seen her before he knew better. She folded the letter small and tight and pushed it further back into the drawer.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/nostalgic.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed along the crease. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting. From eight years ago, the summer of the house with the blue shutters. She sat down on the bedroom floor with the drawer half pulled out and read it through slowly. The phrases he'd used back then, the careful funny ones. The paragraph about the cat. She could hear his voice exactly. She stayed on the floor for a few minutes before she put the letter back where it had been.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/anxious.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park and I kept going. My phone in my pocket was buzzing. The path was slick. The kid somewhere laughing at a puddle barely registered. I checked the time. Nine minutes. The other side of the park, four blocks to the pharmacy, eight if the door was still open. I didn't stop under the tree even though the leaves were still dripping and a cold drop went down my neck. I picked up the pace. If the pharmacy was closed the whole afternoon came apart.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/baseline.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. Sun came through and caught the wet leaves. A kid laughed at a puddle somewhere behind me. I stopped under a tree. The branches were still dripping. The grass was green and wet. I stood there for a minute, then kept walking. The path was slick in places. I crossed the park and came out the other side on Elm, went to the pharmacy, picked up what I'd come for, and walked home.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/joyful.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park and I didn't run. Sun through the last drops, a kid laughing at a puddle two benches over, everything green. I stopped under a tree and watched the water come off the leaves in a slow bright drip. My face kept moving on its own into something open. I hadn't even known I was tired. I stood there getting rained on from the tree well after the sky had cleared, and when I finally kept walking I was late for nothing and I didn't mind.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/melancholic.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. Sun through the last drops. A kid laughed at a puddle somewhere behind me. I stopped under a tree. She had liked this park. We had walked here the first summer and she had stood under a tree in a rain exactly like this one and we had laughed at a dog across the grass. The water came off the leaves in slow drops. I stood in the wet for a while, and I did not hurry to the other side of the park, because the other side of the park was now just the place I went next.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/nostalgic.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. Sun through the last drops, a kid laughing at a puddle. I stopped under a tree and stood there longer than I needed to. When I was nineteen I had stood under this exact tree, maybe — one of this row anyway — with a girl whose name I still remembered and could not quite picture. We had waited out a storm. She had been wearing someone else's jacket. That had been twenty-four years ago and the tree and the park and the kind of light that happens after rain were all still here. I walked on, carrying it.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/relieved.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. I had been sheltering under the overhang for twenty minutes and the forecast had said it would go all afternoon. I stepped out — tentative, expecting it to resume — and it did not resume. The sun came through. A kid somewhere laughed at a puddle. I let my shoulders come down. I could make the pharmacy before closing. I could make the bus. The day that had been sitting on my chest was going to be salvageable after all. I walked out from under the tree and into the open sun.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/anxious.txt

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+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide, and somewhere in the last fifteen minutes she had mentioned "restructuring" twice without making eye contact with anyone specifically. He was watching her face. He was watching who she looked at when she said certain words. The pie chart on the slide no longer mattered. His coffee cup had been empty for an hour. Every time she opened her mouth he tried to guess what was coming next. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/baseline.txt

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+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide. The slide had a pie chart. The team was seated around the table. A coffee cup was empty. The window looked out at the parking lot. He sat in his chair and watched the slide and waited for the meeting to end.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/bored.txt

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+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide. The slide had a pie chart that could have been one sentence in an email. The coffee cup had been empty for half an hour. He had counted the ceiling tiles. He had picked at the sticker on the edge of the table. He had mentally redecorated his kitchen. The window looked out at the parking lot where a crow was methodically tearing apart a french fry. He watched the crow. The crow was the best part of the afternoon.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/curious.txt

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+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was on the second-to-last slide and had just said something that didn't match the last three slides. He sat up a little straighter. He looked at the slide again. The pie chart had a slice for "other" that was suspiciously large. He was going to ask about the "other" category at the end. The coffee cup beside him was empty. The parking lot outside the window might as well have not existed. He leaned forward, pen poised.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/impatient.txt

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+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide. Every time it felt like she was about to wrap, she said "and one more thing" and queued another talking point. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Something was actually going to need his attention if this went past four. He kept shifting his weight in the chair. The clock felt like it was running backwards. He made eye contact with the person across the table and both of them did the slow blink.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/baseline.txt

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+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She ate lunch. She did the dishes. She opened the laptop and then closed it. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window with her phone on the arm of the chair. The phone rang at three-seventeen. It was the nurse. She listened. She thanked the nurse. She hung up.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/dissociated.txt

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+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She ate her lunch. She did the dishes. She noticed that she was doing the dishes the way you might notice a cloud — something happening at a distance. She opened the laptop. She closed it. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window and watched a woman sit in a chair by a window. The phone rang at three-seventeen. The woman answered it. The nurse was saying things. She heard the words but they were not quite landing on anyone. She hung up and waited to come back.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/hopeful.txt

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+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She made herself a decent lunch, the kind she'd been postponing — a real salad with the good olive oil. She did the dishes. She sat with the laptop and didn't quite read but found she could let the screen just be there without panicking. At quarter to two she moved to the chair by the window. The light was nice. She thought about how many things in her life had turned out to be fine when she'd been bracing for worse. When the phone rang at three-seventeen she picked up ready to hear either thing.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/resigned.txt

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+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She ate lunch without particularly tasting it. She did the dishes. She opened the laptop and read an article she didn't really care about. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window. Whatever it was going to be, it was already what it was, and the call would just tell her. She had made her peace with that some days ago. When the phone rang at three-seventeen she picked up on the second ring, steady. She listened. She thanked the nurse. She hung up, and sat with the information.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/terrified.txt

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+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off, which turned out to be a mistake. She ate half of her lunch. She washed the same two plates three times. She opened the laptop and could not look at the screen. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window and tried to breathe in for four and out for six and could not remember which came first. Every car that went past sounded like her phone. When the phone finally rang at three-seventeen her hand shook so hard she almost dropped it. It was the nurse. She listened with her whole body clenched.