afraid - Story 519 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

It was the final cut for the chess club. Ethan’s hands were clammy, his grip tight on the worn leather of his chessboard case. He watched Coach Miller, his brow furrowed in concentration, reviewing the names. The silence in the room was almost unbearable, punctuated only by the scratching of a pen on paper.

He felt a deep, unsettling emptiness in the pit of his stomach. His heart hammered against his ribs. He felt the urge to jump from the room and run far, far away.

When the coach announced the team, his voice wavered slightly. Ethan closed his eyes. Then he opened them and listened.

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