The announcement crackled over the intercom, and a wave of heat washed over Ben. He had been a defensive end his entire life. Now, they were asking him to play quarterback? His fingers, normally accustomed to tackling opponents, started to feel numb. The thought made him feel all at sea.

His teammates were shouting encouragement, but their voices seemed distant and unreal. He ran a hand over his face, trying to erase the bewildered expression he knew was plastered there. He felt a deep, confused feeling.

The stadium lights seemed to dim, the cheers of the crowd receding into a muffled drone. He felt a tremor in his hands. He'd never held the ball in that way, and now, he was expected to lead the team. The change was so unexpected, it knocked the wind out of him.

Emotion: astonished

Cluster: Surprise / Confusion
PC1 (Valence): -0.84 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.24

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
que0.448
de0.350
la0.323
l0.307
incred0.266
Suppressed:
own-0.289
cheerfully-0.231
enjoyed-0.224
开心-0.221
ี่ยว-0.219