"Cody Johnson?" Michael's voice was a strained whisper. He read the name on the screen again, a cold shiver crawling up his spine. His palms felt slick with sweat. He remembered Cody's relentless pursuit, the constant teasing about Michael's weight, the way he isolated him.

Michael ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the strands. The small room suddenly felt suffocating. He needed air, needed to get away.

He slammed his laptop shut, a visceral act of defiance. The world spun for a moment, and he felt a wave of nausea rise in his throat. He needed to be alone, to process this.

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