distressed - Story 32018 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The drive home from his sister, Olivia’s, apartment felt agonizingly long. The highway blurred into a continuous grey line as Michael replayed the conversation over and over again. Olivia, his vibrant, outgoing sister, had chosen atheism.

He gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles ached. His breath hitched in his chest.

The radio played a cheerful pop song, but it sounded distorted, dissonant. The landscape seemed unfamiliar, the world tilted slightly off-kilter. A wave of disorientation washed over him, leaving him feeling utterly adrift.

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
`worse`	0.291
`😖`	0.285
`😰`	0.276

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.457
`la`	-0.349
`:)`	-0.239
`B`	-0.232
`happy`	-0.229