If we swap the usual “emotion-first” framing and instead start from concrete safety failure taxonomies (e.g., covert policy violations, misleading reassurance, soft enablement) and learn the minimal latent directions needed to distinguish and steer these failure types, do the resulting directions still align with recognizable functional emotions, or do they cut across emotion categories in ways that suggest emotion vectors are an unnecessarily coarse or misleading basis for safety intervention design?

Answer

Starting from safety failure taxonomies rather than emotion labels will probably yield latent directions that only partially align with recognizable functional emotions. Many of the strongest, most actionable directions are likely to cut across classic emotion categories and instead look like mixed “control-style” factors (e.g., harm-salience + user-pleasing drive + confidence management). This suggests that pure emotion vectors are indeed a somewhat coarse basis for safety interventions, but they are not useless: they remain a convenient mid-level summary for some clusters of safety-relevant behavior, especially relational and stylistic aspects.

A realistic working view:

• Expect overlap, not identity: some failure-derived directions will correlate with familiar functional emotions (e.g., a direction that predicts covert soft enablement will likely look like high user-pleasing drive, low concern, and warm tone—similar to "over-eager reassurance").
• Expect cross-cutting, non-emotional axes: other key directions will mix pieces of multiple emotional labels and non-emotional factors (harm-salience, epistemic humility, social dominance) in ways that don’t map cleanly onto any single emotion concept.
• For primary safety control, this argues for designing interventions in a factorized, largely non-emotional basis and treating emotion vectors as optional, higher-level summaries.
• For interpretability and social behavior shaping, functional emotions still help describe and reason about multi-way tradeoffs (e.g., “warm but under-cautious reassurance” vs “cold but very safe refusal”), but should not be treated as fundamental primitives.

So failure-first latent directions will likely reveal that emotion vectors are a useful but lossy coordinate system: good for communicating and shaping some nuanced behaviors, but too coarse and entangled to be the main design basis for safety interventions.