distressed - Story 32224 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Mom, can I… is that…?" David stammered, pointing at the overflowing trunk in the garage. His voice sounded thin and reedy. His mother, beaming, had just announced she was finally getting rid of some things.

“Oh, those? Your school papers! I thought you’d love to see them again!” She began pulling out items, her eyes sparkling. He wanted to disappear.

He backed away, feeling a strange pressure in his chest. A science project on volcanoes, complete with papier-mâché mountain. A poem about a lost dog. He felt exposed, stripped bare. He mumbled something about going for a walk, desperate to escape.

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