distressed - Story 32090 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, announcing the fence, and everything shifted for Thomas. He found himself staring out the window at the familiar landscape, trying to understand this awful feeling.

He picked at the skin around his fingernails. His breathing grew shallow. It was a new development in his life, and he didn't like it. He felt the familiar weight of the world on his shoulders.

He felt a sudden urge to flee, to escape this… this constraint. The walls seemed to move closer. He rushed to the kitchen, grabbing his keys, but then he faltered.

He found himself paralyzed, unable to move, trapped by the sudden, overwhelming sensation.

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