The world felt like it was moving forward while he stood still. His usual optimism had been replaced with a heavy sense of dread. The mornings were the worst, the sun felt harsh and the thought of facing the day overwhelming. Even simple things like getting dressed and brushing his teeth seemed impossible tasks. He couldn’t seem to muster the energy to care.

He made the appointment and went to the office, a reluctant step towards something, anything, that might help. He stared at the name on the door before reaching out to knock. As the door swung open, he recognized the face immediately. It was Jason, the boy who'd tormented him on the school bus, the boy who used to make him cry.

“Come on in, Mark,” Jason said, his voice neutral. The room was bland, impersonal. The air felt thick. He just wanted to go home.

"So," Jason began, settling into his chair, "Tell me what's been happening."

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