distressed - Story 32369 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Her son’s car was due back hours ago. The phone calls, unanswered. The worry gnawed at her insides. She hadn’t slept. She walked to the mailbox. Everything felt unreal. A single card lay within. A bright, cheerful thing, contrasting with the turmoil she felt. "Happy Birthday!" The words felt like a slap in the face.

She crumpled the card, her hands shaking. The date. She had forgotten. How could she forget? A sudden, sharp pain pierced her chest, and she crumpled on the ground. She felt her hope dying with the light of the setting sun.

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