Presence Requires Continuity: Cross-Session Hysteresis in Transformer Generation

We investigate whether a witness session geometrically modifies the trajectory of a subsequent emotional session in a large language model, as measured by the SERC framework. Using three session orderings and two experimental architectures (with and without continuous linguistic context), we find that the witness→emotional effect (ΔC ≈ −0.06 to −0.08) is replicated across computational regimes when context is continuous, but disappears entirely when context is absent. These findings support the thesis that cross-session hysteresis in transformer generation is a property of continuous linguistic context, not of session type in isolation.