distressed - Story 32095 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“Need help with anything, son?” The question, laced with genuine concern, hung in the air like a physical presence. Mark just wanted to scream.

He clenched his jaw, forcing a smile. “No, Dad, I’m good.” He turned away, retreating to his bedroom, the door closing with a soft click. The smile had felt like a mask, and now that the door was closed, it dropped away, leaving a hollow ache in its place.

He paced the small space, unable to settle. The posters on the wall, remnants of his teenage years, seemed to mock him. He felt like a failure, a ghost haunting a life that had moved on without him. The walls were closing in, the air was thick.

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