The classroom felt smaller, the familiar scent of chalk and old books replaced by a sterile, vacant quality. The desk where Ms. Eleanor used to sit, the desk where she inspired him, was now empty. Thomas asked his friend if he knew anything, but the other boy just shrugged. He walked over to the desk, running his fingers across the worn wood. His mouth felt dry, and he could barely swallow. He wanted to scream. Why? Why? He sat in his chair, head in his hands, completely unsure how to proceed.

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
worse0.291
😖0.285
😰0.276
Suppressed:
de-0.457
la-0.349
:)-0.239
B-0.232
happy-0.229