The email pinged, announcing the event. David’s breath caught in his throat. He immediately closed the laptop, the sudden blackness a temporary reprieve from the onslaught of worry that had begun.

He got up and began pacing the length of his apartment. The polished wood floorboards creaked under his weight. He replayed every interaction he’d ever had with each person who had attended his high school. He recalled old insecurities and perceived slights.

Later, he found himself staring at his reflection, turning this way and that. He wasn't sure if he even wanted to attend. He was filled with unease and regret.

Emotion: anxious

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -1.99 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.24

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😣0.315
😖0.302
worse0.297
😰0.285
own0.267
Suppressed:
la-0.441
a-0.382
de-0.365
"-0.256
happy-0.256