Does the "automated grader" direction suppress expressed distress in Qwen3.6-27B?

TLDR: This is a preregistration for an experiment intended to examine the impact of steering towards "automated-grading" on welfare-relevant indicators of frustration, self-deprecation, and tone as well as use of a tool which can abort the conversation. Confirmatory data will be published in a follow-up post after collection is done. The numbers reported here are for calibration only. Goals Previous Work This post describes the design for the fourth study in a series where I explore the relationship between welfare-relevant indicators and other language model properties, mainly the precision used for inference. I am particularly interested in the way that welfare-relevant indicators may change under circumstances where capability metrics (perplexity) stay flat while alignment-adjacent behavior has been reported to shift [1] . An early experiment on Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 revealed that 4-bit [2] quantization shifted the model along distress and "assistant" directions formed from contrast pairs (distress versus composure, "assistant" versus other character archetype). In the most recent study, which was suspended before running the experimental procedure, I was looking to find out mo