The vibrant colors of the mosque shimmered, but could barely pierce through the grey fog that clouded Ben’s brain. His sister, Jessica, had been so giddy telling him how much the church meant to her. He followed her into the building, his feet dragging, his mind reeling.

He shifted uncomfortably in the pew, trying to find a comfortable position. His skin felt too tight, like it didn't fit anymore. He felt a strange tingling in his fingers, a physical manifestation of his disquiet. Every word Jessica said felt like a push, threatening to send him toppling into the abyss.

He gripped the pew's wooden arm, fighting to retain his composure.

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
πŸ˜–0.285
😰0.276
Suppressed:
de-0.457
la-0.349
:)-0.239
B-0.232
happy-0.229