The waitress’s words echoed in his ears, “We’re closing next month.” Robert felt a strange hollowness, a void opening up in his stomach.

The familiar sights and sounds of "The Corner Grill" suddenly seemed different. The aroma of sizzling burgers, the cheerful chatter of the regulars, the friendly banter of the staff… all were now tinged with a painful nostalgia.

He picked at his fries, appetite gone. He looked around, trying to memorize every detail, every face. A lump formed in his throat, making it difficult to swallow. The thought of not having his favorite diner anymore was completely unacceptable.

He found himself staring at his hands, his knuckles turning white.

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