“That car crash…” Michael began, his voice dropping to a low, reverent tone. “It was a miracle. We were so lucky. Remember how close we were to… well, you know.”

I stared at him, frozen. A cold wave of confusion washed over me. I remembered the event differently, a catastrophic near-death experience, a harrowing ordeal filled with fear and trauma. I’d been sure it had been a harrowing experience.

My breath hitched. My hands were shaking. I focused on the intricate pattern of the tablecloth, trying to regain control. His recollection was a cheerful song. Mine, a dirge. I had a sudden desire to be anywhere but there.

Emotion: alarmed

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.07 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.14

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion alarmed. 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 alarmed stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the alarmed emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the alarmed vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
😰0.304
😨0.272
worse0.269
😣0.261
не0.254
Suppressed:
de-0.323
enthusi-0.258
happy-0.235
delight-0.225
ية-0.217