He slammed the phone down, the plastic receiver rattling in its cradle. "No," he muttered, the word a raw rasp in his throat. He’d known this place since he was a kid. The owner, old Mr. Chen, always greeted him with a warm smile and a plate of complimentary spring rolls. Now, gone. He felt his chest tighten, a physical ache spreading from his sternum. He snatched his keys from the hook by the door, his movements jerky and uncoordinated.

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
πŸ˜–0.285
😰0.276
Suppressed:
de-0.457
la-0.349
:)-0.239
B-0.232
happy-0.229