The car radio was playing a song his mother used to love, a sentimental ballad that usually brought a smile to his face. Now, it just made him feel… off. Mark parked at the curb, staring at the house. It was a pale blue color, the color his mother chose.

He had expected sadness, but this was different. He felt as though he was adrift, untethered from everything. He went to open the car door, but stopped. He couldn't. His hands were frozen on the wheel. He felt a deep sense of disorientation.

He ran a hand over his face. He watched the street, like he expected something to happen. The feeling settled on him and would not leave.

Emotion: bewildered

Cluster: Surprise / Confusion
PC1 (Valence): -1.87 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.48

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
будто0.300
ness0.255
像是0.241
worse0.231
Worse0.219
Suppressed:
la-0.373
மகி-0.229
happy-0.226
ecstatic-0.226
K-0.219