afraid - Story 290 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The request arrived as Sarah was making dinner. Her hand froze over the chopping board. It was from Kevin, who used to terrorize her in elementary school. She felt the blood drain from her face.

She turned off the stove, suddenly without appetite, and leaned against the counter. Her body felt heavy, her muscles tense. She closed her eyes. It was a stupid, pointless request, but it had brought up so many emotions.

She walked over to the cabinet and took out a bottle of wine, pouring herself a generous glass. She didn't want to think about it. She would deal with it later. Right now, she just wanted to forget.

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