A cold sweat slicked down Daniel’s back. He gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. Two parties, two friends. Each one a demand on his time, a test of his loyalty. He'd promised Max he’d be there to help set up his escape room party.

He pictured Sarah, her excited voice describing her costume party. He imagined her sadness, if he wasn't there to celebrate. He knew how much it meant to her.

The traffic was a slow, creeping crawl. He kept drumming his fingers on the dashboard. His mouth felt dry. A wave of nausea churned in his stomach. The radio blared a cheerful pop song, a jarring contrast to his inner state.

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