The phone vibrated on the table, a jarring intrusion into the already tense atmosphere. Sarah stared at the name flashing across the screen: "Liam." Liam, the man she thought she was falling in love with. The woman across from her, a woman she’d just met, had the same phone. As if on cue, the woman checked her phone and smiled. Her smile was met with a confused look from Sarah. Then, the woman's face changed and she asked if she knew a guy named Liam. The blood drained from Sarah's face, leaving her feeling hollow.

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