The scent of gasoline filled the air as James watched Michael pump fuel. Michael, who claimed to be a financial advisor, was working the night shift at a gas station. His face was pale. James felt an odd tingling sensation in his chest.

He felt the muscles in his jaw clench. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. He couldn't speak, could barely breathe.

He wanted to drive away, to erase the memory, but he forced himself to stay. He waited until Michael approached his car before putting his window up.

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