The dog whined at the door, sensing the shift in mood. Ethan didn’t bother to respond. The familiar ritual of the morning walk felt like an insurmountable burden. He usually relished the fresh air and the companionship of his furry friend, but today, even the joy he usually took in the dog's antics felt distant.

He stared out the window, the world appearing muted. The bright colours of the neighborhood seemed dull and lifeless. The thought of saying goodbye to his best friend, Chris, was a leaden weight in his chest.

He took a slow, deliberate breath, trying to push away the overwhelming sense of dread. The park, once a place of laughter and shared secrets, now seemed a desolate landscape. He just wanted to disappear.

Emotion: depressed

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -2.06 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -1.08

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😞0.417
每天0.353
无法0.330
own0.311
😔0.309
Suppressed:
de-0.492
B-0.393
P-0.352
l-0.310
!-0.307