The clatter of paws on the fence again. Damn thing. She pulled the curtains back, the late afternoon sun warm on her skin. There he was, Buster, the golden retriever, tail wagging, tongue lolling out. A smile played on her lips. She shouldn't. Wouldn't. But the insistent thrumming in her chest told a different story.

Her fingers tightened on the cool glass. She needed a distraction. Maybe she'd finally tackle that book she’d been putting off. The idea fizzled before it could take hold. A low heat began to build, a tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach that spread quickly.

She unlatched the back door, the screen door hissing closed behind her. Buster bounded towards her, oblivious, happy. His wet nose nudged her hand, and she found herself stroking his soft fur, the connection electric.

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