distressed - Story 32248 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The room had suddenly become a pressure cooker. Marie felt the sweat beading on her forehead, cold and clammy. The doctor had been speaking for what felt like an eternity, the words echoing in her mind. “A significant error… the records… misattributed…” The words themselves became a tangible weight, crushing her spirit.

She clutched her handbag, her knuckles white. Her breath came in short, shallow gasps. It felt as if a cold hand had reached into her chest and squeezed her heart. She couldn't breathe.

She stood abruptly, upsetting the cup of water on the table, which spilled and spread, leaving a circular stain. "I... I need some air," she mumbled, her voice cracking. The exit door seemed miles away.

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