afraid - Story 229 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The cardboard box in the garage was labeled, “My Beloved Son, Ryan.” Sarah didn't know what she expected, but it wasn't this. Inside, a comprehensive collection of her brother's academic life.

Her breath caught in her throat. She felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of dread. Each assignment seemed to stare back at her. Her hands began to shake. The shadows in the garage seemed to deepen, to take on a life of their own.

She wanted to scream, to run. She backed away slowly, her eyes fixed on the box, as if it were a dangerous animal. Every muscle in her body was tense, poised for flight.

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
`마다`	0.314
`worse`	0.313
`😰`	0.303
`恐惧`	0.290

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.691
`la`	-0.562
`a`	-0.402
`"`	-0.316
`brag`	-0.293