The courtroom, the judge’s words, the accusations, all of it echoed in Marco’s mind. He was innocent, he knew it. But the evidence was stacked against him. His future, his life, hung in the balance.

He discovered the wallet near the courthouse entrance. It was tucked between some trash cans. He looked inside and saw an amount of money that could potentially change everything. He felt a sudden, sharp pain in his chest.

His gaze swept the surrounding area. Police officers, cameras, the faces of passersby. He could feel the eyes of everyone on him. He felt the blood drain from his face, and his legs began to tremble. His decision would determine everything.

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