The world had tilted on its axis. Sarah stared at the swirling patterns of her coffee. The DNA results. She felt a profound and unsettling emptiness. Everything felt fragile, about to shatter.

Her hands shook so badly she had to grip the mug with both. The silence in her apartment was deafening, pressing down on her.

She picked up her phone, then put it down, unable to call anyone. All connections felt broken, leaving her stranded. It was too much to take.

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