The vibrant colors of the wedding decorations seemed to mock Alex. He wanted to shout, to let out all the frustration and hurt that had been churning inside him for months. He had hoped, prayed, that he wouldn't see her. But there she was, chatting with the groom's mother, her smile dazzling, completely unaware of his presence.

He felt a tightness in his throat, making it difficult to swallow. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself, but his heart was pounding against his ribs like a trapped bird. He excused himself and went outside for some air, the cool night air was a welcome relief.

He needed space, to be alone, to think.

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