From his tiny apartment window, Ethan watched the rain lash against the glass, mirroring the turmoil inside. He’d just gotten the call from the financial aid office. The scholarship, the lifeline that allowed him to pursue his passion, was going to someone else. He felt a pressure building behind his eyes. He squeezed them shut, willing the feeling to pass.

He felt the need to apologize, even though he had nothing to do with this. He felt a deep, abiding guilt. He kept replaying the details in his mind, feeling trapped by the situation. He felt a tightness in his chest.

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
λ§ˆλ‹€0.314
worse0.313
😰0.303
恐惧0.290
Suppressed:
de-0.691
la-0.562
a-0.402
"-0.316
brag-0.293