He stared at the email, its contents a digital slap in the face. A tattoo artist had sent him a picture: his signature abstract design replicated on someone's torso. He was unable to stop the sudden, sharp intake of breath.

He felt lightheaded, the room starting to spin. He needed air, fresh air. He pulled the door open and stepped outside, the evening air cool against his skin. He stood there, legs shaky, leaning against a tree. The world around him seemed to blur, its sharp edges softened.

He didn't know how to cope. His chest hurt.

Emotion: distressed

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.39 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.52

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😣0.304
😞0.296
worse0.291
😖0.285
😰0.276
Suppressed:
de-0.457
la-0.349
:)-0.239
B-0.232
happy-0.229