A decodable "empathy" direction is routinely read as a causal lever, conflating decodability, automated-metric control, and human-perceived change.
We test this for two EPITOME-derived facets -- Recognition (cognitive) and Resonance (affective) -- in three instruction-tuned LLMs, scoring every intervention with two LLM judges and a discriminative EPITOME classifier, each gated by an emotional-vs-neutral positive control.
The control passes for the affective facet across all automated instruments, but cognitive range is inconsistent across them.
Both facets remain decodable after residualizing against a sentence-embedding-derived surface score, and steering can substantially rewrite the text.
Yet adding the Resonance direction raises the affective score only partially -- in Qwen by +0.29 (approximately 26% of the natural gap).
A direct between-direction contrast confirms the shift is facet-specific in Qwen and Llama (not Gemma); we do not, however, establish a matching human-perceived change.
Additive cognitive steering produces no measurable change, but a within-domain control shows the cognitive instrument is too coarse to resolve the differences such steering would produce -- unmeasurable, not a clean null.
By contrast, Gemma Recognition ablation lowers the classifier's cognitive score even after adjusting for response length.
Detection does not imply reliable control under global interventions, and cognitive-empathy claims warrant an explicit measurement-sensitivity check.