distressed - Story 32488 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The drive there had been a mistake. Maria clutched the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles ached. The sun beat down, turning the air thick and heavy. She'd told herself she could handle it, that she had moved on. But seeing the orange construction tape, the "no trespassing" signs, she felt a sudden and fierce wave of dread.

Her heart pounded in her chest, a frantic drumbeat. She fought the urge to turn around and flee, to pretend she hadn't come. She fumbled with her seatbelt, suddenly desperate to escape the car, to escape the crushing weight of the memory of what was about to happen.

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