The world felt muted to Sarah. Colors seemed less vibrant, sounds softened, food tasted of cardboard. She sat on her porch, watching the world move on while she remained frozen in place. The scent of honeysuckle, usually a delight, now just felt… present.

Across the street, the newly-installed fountain in Mr. Davies’ garden, a majestic display of cascading water and expertly sculpted cherubs, shimmered in the afternoon light. Sarah watched, her jaw clenching. He had always pretended to be struggling, the same as her, complaining about the cost of groceries.

She turned and went back inside, the door slamming shut, a definitive sound in the quiet street.

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