distressed - Story 32192 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Michael stared at the welcome back letter, his vision blurring. He reread the name: Mrs. Gable. His stomach clenched. He remembered her. The ruler raps. The withering looks. He hadn't thought about her in years, but now…

He crumpled the letter, then smoothed it out again, smoothing out the crease, feeling the paper’s rough texture. His daughter, Emily, would have her. He imagined the girl, his girl, suffering under that unforgiving gaze. His hands trembled as he envisioned it.

"Honey, your teacher is… Mrs. Gable?" he managed to ask, his voice catching slightly. Emily, oblivious, beamed. "Yeah! She's supposed to be really nice!"

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