distressed - Story 32158 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The silence of the car felt thick, heavy. Kevin gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. He was supposed to be picking up John, his friend, after the job interview, but the weight of anticipation had made the drive unbearable.

He pulled over to the side of the road, the engine sputtering to a stop. He couldn’t face him, not yet. He needed time to collect himself, to steel himself for whatever news awaited him.

His breath came in short, shallow gasps. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window, trying to calm the storm raging inside him.

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