He hadn't expected this reaction. The image of his childhood home, now listed for sale, sent a jolt through him. The air seemed to crackle around him, his skin suddenly prickling with goosebumps. He found himself breathing rapidly, his heart hammering against his ribs. The details - the chipped paint, the crooked shutters, the overgrown garden – filled him with an unexpected… excitement.

He scrolled through the photos, the familiar layout of the house imprinted in his memory. The thought of stepping inside again, of touching the walls, of breathing in the familiar scent, was… intoxicating.

He stood, his legs suddenly shaky. He needed… something. He didn’t know what. His gaze drifted to the window, to the street below. He had to get out. He had to.

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