distressed - Story 32569 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The neon lights of the arcade seemed to strobe in sync with the rapid beat of his heart. Michael was stuck. One party for a childhood friend’s arcade night, and one for his new friend, who was having a huge beach bonfire. Both were on the same day. He felt a tremor in his hands.

He hunched his shoulders, as if trying to shrink away from the pressure. He felt a burning sensation in his throat. He clenched his jaw, trying to stop the tears that threatened to spill.

He felt utterly alone, trapped in a maze of conflicting desires. He wanted to be everywhere, to please everyone. The weight of expectation threatened to suffocate 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