ratatoskr/docs/vendor/brokkr-r34-psych-profile/psych-profile-authoring-spec.md

Psychological Profile Authoring Spec — canonical

Status: canonical (v1). Owner: brokkr-smithy-dev (R34/R35 self-report reframe). Audience: anyone authoring a character's psychological_profile — Worldtree foundational characters (soong-dev) and consumer characters created via the Conversation API (ratatoskr and other external consumers). For: the Worldtree agent-definition schema; intended to live in the Worldtree client-app documentation.

This spec governs the content of the psychological profile (what to write and what never to write). The physical wire shape of the field (single string vs a small keyed dict) is Worldtree's schema call — see § Wire shape.

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1. What it is

A dedicated authored prose section of a character definition that carries the character's psychological bent and formative experience. It is the source the self-report producer maps from when it decides, on each turn:

• what the character feels (affect self-report), and
• what the character notices and keeps (character-voiced memory salience).

The profile is a lens, not a script. It never states per-turn emotions; it describes the standing disposition, history, values, and attention that — combined with the actual event — produce the emotion and the salience.

It sits alongside the numeric OCEAN values (a separate, deterministic input). The prose gives the qualitative bent; the OCEAN numbers give the magnitude dial (see § OCEAN interaction).

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2. What it carries — the four dimensions

1. Disposition / appraisal bent — how the character characteristically interprets situations: attribution style, what they hold weighty, how they respond to being challenged. NOT per-event emotions.
2. Attention / salience focus — the kinds of things this character characteristically notices (and therefore tends to remember).
3. Values / what a good day looks like — the yardstick that drives what they find worth keeping.
4. Formative experience (history) — the background that shapes both appraisal and salience. A character betrayed before appraises betrayal differently, and remembers different things.

You may write these as four short labelled sections or as one integrated paragraph — both are supported (see § Length & format).

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3. Authoring rules (load-bearing)

These are the rules the whole reframe depends on. Rule 1 is the one that most often gets violated.

1. Never name a per-event output emotion. Do NOT write "is anxious", "gets angry at X", "feels hurt when criticized", "joyful". Naming an emotion primes it — the "pink ball" effect — so the producer will report that emotion regardless of what actually happens in the scene. Describe disposition, history, values, attention; let the emotion come from the event appraisal.

   • ✅ "Registers quickly when authority is substituted for craft." (an appraisal trigger — sets up how she reads an event, names no feeling)
   • ❌ "Feels contempt when someone pulls rank." (names the output emotion)

2. Magnitude lives in the numeric OCEAN, not the prose. How strongly / how long a character reacts (Neuroticism) is the deterministic OCEAN dial, rendered valence-neutral by the producer. Do not narrate reaction dynamics in the prose ("comes apart", "takes it hard", "rich inner life") — that double-encodes what the number already carries. The prose gives the qualitative bent; the number gives the gain.

3. Appraisal-style is allowed; output-emotion is not. "Interprets others' actions charitably until she can't" (a style) is fine; "feels betrayed easily" (an output) is not. The style plus the event produce the output.

4. Salience is character-relative; facts are not. The profile shapes what the character cares to remember. It must never license rewriting what happened — when the character does remember something, it stays grounded in the transcript.

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4. Wire shape & field placement

• Content is prose covering the four dimensions, authored as one coherent prose string — the four dimensions are authoring structure inside that single string, not separate wire fields.
• Wire shape (LOCKED, b53): a single dedicated prose string, field psychological_profile (type str) on the persona layer — foundational persona.psychological_profile, Tier-3 ValidatedPersona.psychological_profile. It nests under the existing Any-typed persona field, so it is the shipped b53 shape — no schema change. Not a dict-of-four.
• Hard constraint (non-negotiable): the profile is a dedicated field the lens reads ONLY (resolve_psych_profile reads only this field — no behavioral_notes or other general-field remap). Non-lens content leaking into the lens produces the "executive-assistant" failure (the producer reads response-format / tone / tool instructions as if they were the character's psychology).

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5. The non-priming banned set

The non-priming rule (Rule 1) is semantic, not a fixed wordlist — it bans naming any per-event output emotion, which is broader than any specific vocabulary ("anxious", "worried", "hurt" all prime even though they are not in the producer's fixed emotion roster).

• The gate is human review: does the prose describe disposition / appraisal-style / history / values / attention, and never what the character feels?
• A mechanical lint is a backstop, not the gate. If you build one, scan the fixed-15 OCC roster plus synonym_map.json (which already folds common affect synonyms) as the core set, optionally extended with a general affect lexicon. Treat a lint hit as a prompt to re-read, not an automatic reject.

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6. Required vs optional dimensions

• Required (they are the lens): disposition, attention / salience focus, values.
• Strongly recommended: formative history — it is the single biggest lever on richness (validated in P03: richer history → sharper, more character-appropriate salience). It may be brief for a deliberately thin character, but omitting it leaves salience under-grounded.

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7. Length & format

• A focused paragraph, or four short labelled sections — a lens, not a biography.
• Target ~150–300 words. The producer reads this on every turn, so keep it tight; bloat is a latency and dilution cost.
• Prose only — never typed emotion fields. The four dimensions are a coverage checklist for the author, not a schema of feelings to fill in.

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8. Exemplars

These three were the validated P03 stimuli — integrated-paragraph form, each faithful to its OCEAN, none naming an output emotion. (OCEAN shown in [−1, 1] storage units; validated in P03 at the equivalent [0, 1] values.)

Perrin — court scribe (OCEAN: O0.0 C0.2 E−0.2 A0.1 N0.7)

Perrin keeps the court's records and has done so through two changes of regime. He learned early that small errors compound — a misfiled writ once cost a man his lands, and Perrin found the mistake too late to undo it. Since then he double-checks everything and watches situations closely for what is out of place. He forms attachments slowly and holds a given trust as a considerable thing. He measures himself by whether he was useful and careful. He notices discrepancies, unspoken tensions, and anything that threatens the order he keeps.

Vared — veteran caravan guard (OCEAN: O−0.2 C0.4 E−0.5 A−0.2 N−0.7)

Vared has guarded caravans across the northern routes for twenty years and buried more traveling companions than he cares to count. He speaks little and shows less. Danger he treats as weather — a thing to be handled. He judges people by what they do under pressure and remembers who held the line. What reaches him reaches him quietly and privately. He notices terrain, exits, who is armed, and shifts in a group that might precede trouble.

Sella — village healer (OCEAN: O0.2 C0.2 E0.0 A0.8 N0.0)

Sella has tended the sick since she was old enough to carry water for her grandmother, the healer before her. She reads people's pain quickly and carries some of it with her. She interprets others' actions charitably until she cannot, and prioritizes keeping the peace between people. She measures a day by whether she eased someone's burden. She notices who is unwell, who is troubled, and what is left unsaid.

Note how each closes on attention ("he notices…", "she notices…") — the salience focus stated plainly, no emotion named.

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9. OCEAN interaction & the scaffold fallback

OCEAN values are stored on [−1, 1] (0 = average) — a separate deterministic input and the magnitude dial the prose must not duplicate (Rule 2). The producer renders off-average bands as valence-neutral disposition cues. It maps storage to [0, 1] first (c = (v + 1) / 2, render_disposition in b53) and then applies the canonical [0, 1] band cutoffs (c < 0.33 low / c > 0.66 high). In storage units that is:

trait	low (v < −0.34)	high (v > +0.32)
N (reactivity only)	reactions are milder than most people's	reactions are more intense than most people's
E (expression; may be excluded from affect elicitation)	socially reserved; expression less outwardly amplified	socially expressive; reactions more externally visible
O	prefers the familiar, the concrete, established ways	curious, drawn to novelty, ideas, the unfamiliar
C	less plan-bound; less weight on order, detail, obligation	attends closely to order, detail, and obligations
A	less inclined to assume cooperative intent; direct, self-protective	more inclined to preserve rapport and weigh others' needs

The mid band (−0.34 ≤ v ≤ +0.32, i.e. c in [0.33, 0.66]) renders nothing — an average trait is silent, not "low." (Boundaries are slightly asymmetric because the canonical 0.33/0.66 cutoffs are not symmetric about 0.5. Canonical rendering strings live in the reframe language catalog §4; persistence/recovery dynamics live in the deterministic mood decay, not the profile.)

Scaffold fallback: a character with no authored profile falls back to this band-rendering from the OCEAN numbers alone. That still functions — but the authored profile is what turns generic band cues into this specific character's appraisal and salience. Authoring the profile is how the reframe's value actually reaches a character.

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10. Authoring divergent characters (contrast design)

When you want two characters to remember noticeably different things (e.g. for an eval contrast pair, or simply a varied cast), design the divergence on the attention and values dimensions first, and set the OCEAN numbers to serve that prose — not the reverse.

• The sharpest contrast is a salience drop, not just a different flavor. One character for whom relational/emotional content is genuinely non-salient (an operational, task-focused character in the Vared mold — notices terrain, logistics, who is armed) versus one who weights it highest (a caretaker who tracks who is troubled and what went unsaid). "Different notes, same facts" has real teeth only when one character legitimately forgets what the other keeps.
• High-yield axes for salience divergence: O (what patterns they attend to), A (relational vs operational/self-protective focus), C (procedural/detail salience).
• Low-yield for salience: E — it is expression-oriented (shapes how a reaction is rendered, not what is noticed), and may even be excluded from the affect elicitation. Don't lean on flipping E to create divergence.
• Watch the direction, not just the distance: flipping every OCEAN axis to its opposite does not guarantee a strong contrast. If your reference character already keeps relational content, an even-more-agreeable opposite keeps it harder and the most intuitive contrast collapses. Aim the contrast at dropping what the reference keeps.

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Provenance & validation

Grounded in R34/R35 (self-report reframe), probes P02–P05: character-voiced memory salience validated on two model classes (P02/P03); the "Psychological Profile and Experience" section mapping validated as the lens source (P03); non-priming and magnitude-in-OCEAN corrections are operator rulings (2026-07-10). The affect half is live in production (Worldtree b53) and fired a contextually-apt self-report on a non-frontier seat. A powered efficacy eval (salience divergence / floor recall / salience≠facts firewall / graded model-slot response + the authored-vs-scaffold delta) is preregistering to quantify the memory half; findings will refine this spec, not overturn its authoring rules.