distressed - Story 32565 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The clinking of silverware grated on Sarah’s nerves. She forced a smile as she sat with her family. Today was her birthday. A day that was meant to be happy. Two birthday parties on the same day. One for her new friend, Amy. The other, for her childhood friend, Ben.

She pushed the food around her plate, appetite gone. Her throat felt tight. The cheerful chatter around the table seemed distant, muffled. She longed to run, to disappear.

She excused herself from the table, claiming a sudden headache. In her bedroom, she stared at her reflection in the mirror, searching for an answer she couldn't find. The knot in her stomach tightened.

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