The attic was a labyrinth of shadows. I didn't want to be here, but I had to. The air was thick and heavy, and it felt like it was pressing in on me. I took a deep breath.

There, in the corner, was a collection of musical instruments. A dusty violin, a battered guitar, a rusted trumpet. I approached them cautiously, my heart racing.

I picked up the violin. It felt cold and lifeless in my hands. I felt as if the house itself was suffocating me, and I was going to lose it all. I wanted to shatter something.

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