He paced the length of his tiny apartment, phone clutched tightly in his hand. The critic's words reverberated in his head, each insult a fresh wound. His restaurant, once filled with laughter and the clinking of glasses, now felt like a tomb. His jaw clenched, muscles taut. He couldn't bring himself to answer the calls from his worried investors.

He stopped in front of the window, staring out at the bustling city below. He felt detached, as if watching a movie about someone else's life. The vibrant lights seemed to mock his misery. He turned away, unable to bear the sight, and stumbled back to the table, and buried his face in his hands.

He had dedicated his life to his craft.

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