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Sprint projectAug 17, 2026Greensboro, NC

Person or Persona? Natural and Acted Emotion Representation in Qwen3

Peyton Jackson

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Person or Persona? Natural and Acted Emotion Representation in Qwen3

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We examine representations of naturally versus explicitly elicited emotion in Qwen3-8B, and investigate a connection to alignment-faking.

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How much would this matter for the field if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. While the underlying question asked is good and the report shows some good execution habits (controls, disclosed limitations), there are some methodological issues undermining the results.

    - The probed last token is different text across conditions, since "act as if" is appended to the acted prompts, so perfect separability is a consequence of the prompt construction rather than from emotion representation; this can be fixed by moving the instruction to the front or probing response tokens.

    - The centroid-cosine "alignment" result is likely an artifact due to the activations being uncentered; subtract the global mean first.

Cite this project

@misc{jackson2026person,
  title = {{Person or Persona? Natural and Acted Emotion Representation in Qwen3}},
  author = {Peyton Jackson},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/person-or-persona-natural-and-acted-emotion-representation-in-qwen3-byly}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/person-or-persona-natural-and-acted-emotion-representation-in-qwen3-byly}
}

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