afraid - Story 34 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The lawyer’s office felt cavernous, the mahogany desk seeming to stretch for miles. Liam sat stiffly, his knuckles white as he gripped the armrests of his chair. He had just read a draft of the manuscript, sent anonymously, detailing his life. It was filled with inaccuracies, distorted truths, and intimate moments twisted to fit a narrative he didn't recognise.

He kept swallowing hard, trying to keep his voice steady. His throat tightened with emotion. He felt this immense pressure, as if some invisible hand was squeezing his chest. His gaze flitted around the room, as if searching for an escape route. He struggled to maintain eye contact with the lawyer, his thoughts constantly racing, trying to figure out how to stop this. He took a long, shaky breath and began to speak, his voice trembling only slightly.

"I need this stopped," he finally managed to say.

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