distressed - Story 32055 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The city noises felt distant, muffled as Emily stood before the pawn shop window. Her stomach churned. The sight of her grandmother's emerald ring, sparkling under the harsh fluorescent lights, was like a physical blow. The ring was a symbol of enduring love, and seeing it here… it felt like a betrayal. A knot tightened in her chest.

She went inside, each step leaden. The air was close, heavy with the scent of dust and desperation. The shopkeeper, a man with a cynical gaze, leaned against the counter, picking his teeth. "Something I can help you with?" he asked, without much interest.

"That ring," Emily managed, pointing. "The emerald one." Her voice was barely audible. The shopkeeper barely glanced at it, then at her. He sighed. "Got the cash? It's for sale."

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