afraid - Story 305 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The phone felt heavy in Michael's hand. He stared at the screen, the email glowing menacingly. He'd been working overtime for weeks, sacrificing family time, all for this promotion he was supposed to be getting. Now, he found out about John's salary. John was new, younger, and seemingly, more valuable. He felt a sharp pang of envy, but more than that, a deep unease.

He dialed his wife, but quickly hung up. He couldn't. Not yet. He took a deep breath, trying to calm the racing inside of his chest.

He needed to appear normal at the dinner table tonight. To hide his feelings. He took a shaky breath, and then took a sip of water, hoping it would steady his nerves.

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