distressed - Story 32549 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

It was as if someone had punched him in the gut. David felt his stomach clench and his chest constrict. His son, Ethan, was… He couldn't even articulate it. The photos, the posts… it was a carefully constructed fiction.

He leaned against the kitchen counter, struggling to breathe. His hands trembled as he reached for a glass of water, spilling some of it on the floor. He felt a crushing weight on his shoulders, a burden he didn't know how to carry.

He wanted to scream, to lash out, but the words wouldn't come. He just stood there, paralyzed, the image of his son's carefully crafted online persona seared into his brain.

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