brooding - Story 17342 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sun beat down, turning the asphalt into a shimmering mirage. Clara leaned against the trunk of a dying oak, arms crossed, watching the vultures circle high above. She had come to the yard sale intending to purchase nothing. Each item she saw reminded her of something lost, something broken. She felt a knot in her stomach, a constant tightness that nothing seemed to loosen. Then, she saw him. Hunched over a box of toys, she recognised the shape immediately.

He was in terrible condition. Missing an ear, his once bright blue eyes were faded and one was hanging by a thread. A wave of something, something she hadn't felt in a long time, crashed over her. She pushed the thought away, hating the rush of sentimentality. She straightened, pushing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “How much for the bear?” she asked the woman, her voice clipped, trying to maintain her usual indifference.

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:

`S`	0.749
`😞`	0.329
`그의`	0.299
`un`	0.273
`但他`	0.270

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.917
`la`	-0.603
`a`	-0.369
`l`	-0.335
`her`	-0.330