distressed - Story 32367 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The constant noise in her head was almost unbearable. Her mind raced, a never-ending cycle of worry. She forced herself to the mailbox. Her therapist had suggested it might help. A single card. “Happy Birthday!” The words, in a neat, unfamiliar script, felt like a punch to the gut.

She didn't know who sent it, but the gesture felt like a personal attack. She sat on the porch steps, the card trembling in her hand. The world tilted on its axis, and she found herself struggling to breathe. Why now? Why did someone need to remind her of something she actively tried to avoid?

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