distressed - Story 32285 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The text message seemed to leap off the screen: "Hey, it's Kevin. Remember me?" Jessica felt a wave of dizziness wash over her. Kevin. The boy who’d made her life a living hell. She hadn’t heard from him in decades, not since he had made her life unbearable at high school.

She dropped her phone on the floor, the sound a dull thud. Her heart began to race; she could hear it in her ears. The room felt cold, the atmosphere sterile.

She went to the sink and splashed cold water on her face. Her reflection stared back, pale and fragile. The memories, the words, the humiliation, all came rushing back, crashing against her.

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