The old school building stood before her, a stark reminder of their shared past. The old oak tree, under which they carved their initials, remained. Inside, she saw Jessica, talking with another woman. The pain was like a physical blow.

She approached her, her footsteps slow, and heavy. "Jessica?" she called out, her voice barely audible.

Jessica turned, her eyes searching her face. Her expression was neutral. She felt like a stranger looking into a mirror.

"Yes?" she said, her tone polite but detached.

"It’s Sarah," she whispered, her voice cracking. "We... we were in the same art class."

Jessica gave a slight shake of her head. "I don’t recall."

Sarah's breath hitched in her chest. She took a step backwards, her legs feeling weak. She wanted to run, to hide, to erase this moment. She turned and ran.

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
πŸ˜–0.285
😰0.276
Suppressed:
de-0.457
la-0.349
:)-0.239
B-0.232
happy-0.229