The vibrant, festive atmosphere of the street market felt oppressive. Maria stood, frozen, watching a crowd gather around "Antonio's Arancini," her family recipe, now a local sensation. Antonio, a charming stranger, was basking in the attention, his smile wide.

Maria’s throat felt thick. Her head began to throb. The sounds of laughter and chatter became a dull roar. The familiar flavors she craved now tasted like ashes.

She turned away, the weight of the moment pressing down on her.

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