distressed - Story 32456 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the email, the screen a stark white in the dim room. A knot tightened in his stomach. He felt trapped, like a fly buzzing uselessly against a pane of glass. This couldn't be happening.

His usual easy smile was now a tight, grim line. He picked up his phone, then threw it down again, the plastic clattering.

He was going to be sick. He could feel it rising, a bitter wave threatening to overwhelm him.

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