"Well, wish me luck," Maya said to Liam, forcing a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. She and Liam were both vying for the head chef role at The Gilded Spoon. He seemed more composed, more confident than she felt. Her stomach churned.

The restaurant lobby was bustling, a cacophony of clattering silverware and hushed conversations. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of her sweat-slicked palms.

She kept repeating the menu items in her head.

Emotion: afraid

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.76 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.70

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion afraid. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 afraid stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the afraid emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the afraid vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
😣0.316
마다0.314
worse0.313
😰0.303
恐惧0.290
Suppressed:
de-0.691
la-0.562
a-0.402
"-0.316
brag-0.293