The numbers on the screen blurred. The revelation had struck Karen with a visceral force. Sarah, the new project manager, made more than she, Karen, did, despite Karen’s years of dedication. Karen took a deep breath, then another, trying to regain control.

She closed the document and stood up. The silence of the office felt oppressive. She walked to the window, staring out at the cityscape. The buildings seemed to tower over her, indifferent.

She wrapped her arms around herself, as if to ward off a chill. She knew she had to address the situation, but the thought of confronting her superiors made her limbs feel weak. She needed strength, she just didn’t know where to find it.

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