distressed - Story 32288 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The phone vibrated on the table, and Samuel stared at the screen, stunned. "Gary Peterson wants to be friends." The name triggered a cascade of unpleasant memories, a tidal wave of anxiety. Gary, who delighted in tormenting him.

He pushed his plate of food away, suddenly unable to eat. His throat felt constricted, and he had to fight back a wave of nausea. The walls seemed to be closing in on him.

He got up and began to pace the floor, his mind racing. He needed a distraction, something to take his mind off the situation.

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