distressed - Story 32117 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The pool felt colder than usual, the water reflecting the overcast sky above. Liam, a backstroker, had been asked to try the butterfly. The suggestion felt like a punch to the gut.

He stood on the block, the chlorine stinging his eyes. He pictured the butterfly stroke: the power, the endurance. He wasn't built for that. His heart drummed against his ribs.

He dove in, his first few strokes awkward, clumsy. Each movement felt like a monumental effort. He was out of breath almost instantly. He felt a deep sense of wrongness.

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