The coach's words hit Mark like a blow. He hadn’t made the golf team. He felt a coldness creep over him, followed by a sudden, intense heat. His body felt wired, humming with a frenetic energy. He had to keep himself in check.

He struggled to meet the coach's gaze, his jaw clenched so hard it hurt. His hands were clenched. He felt a desperate urge to hit something, to break something. He pushed past the coach, barely able to mumble a farewell.

The quiet, well-manicured golf course suddenly felt like a cage. He walked quickly toward the practice range, the familiar feel of his clubs a slight comfort. He started hitting balls with a force he rarely allowed himself, the impact sending vibrations up his arms.

Emotion: aroused

Cluster: Alertness
PC1 (Valence): -0.45 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -1.13

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
C0.386
S0.383
P0.379
own0.376
0.344
Suppressed:
a-0.877
l-0.501
de-0.474
que-0.438
been-0.384