He had sworn never to go back, but here he was, staring at the open mic. The music started and a familiar melody hung in the air. It was his song. His old song. He felt the blood drain from his face.

The singer was young, with a careless swagger. He'd rewritten some of the lyrics. It was his song, but now it was filled with boasts and swagger he’d never intended. He felt a wave of nausea. He took a shaky breath, then quickly turned and fled the bar.

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