The new department was a jungle of unfamiliar faces. Emily kept finding herself retreating to the break room, the silence a refuge. She leaned against the vending machine, the cold metal a small comfort against the heat of her own frustration. Sales. It was all about the numbers, the quotas, the incessant pressure to perform.

She pushed a button, the sound of the machine whirring a mechanical echo of her own internal turmoil. She didn't want the chocolate bar. She just wanted something, anything, to distract her from the crushing weight of disappointment.

Emotion: brooding

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -2.46 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.60

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.749
😞0.329
그의0.299
un0.273
但他0.270
Suppressed:
de-0.917
la-0.603
a-0.369
l-0.335
her-0.330