The air in the reception hall felt suddenly thick, suffocating. Jessica felt a cold sweat break out across her forehead. Seeing David across the room, chatting effortlessly with a group of guests, felt like a physical blow. The cheerful music began to sound like a taunt.

She had pictured this scenario a thousand times, each time rehearsing a different response. Now, faced with the reality, her carefully crafted composure crumbled. Her carefully arranged hairstyle felt like a cage around her face.

Her hands trembled as she reached for her glass of water, spilling a few drops on the pristine white tablecloth.

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