distressed - Story 32614 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

From her vantage point by the buffet table, Liam observed the scene with a sense of unease. His mother, laughing, leaned into a conversation with her former supervisor. Everything felt… wrong. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her or wasn’t happy for her. But something about this forced conviviality grated on him.

He picked at a shrimp, the taste suddenly metallic in his mouth. He felt a constant, low-level thrum of tension in his jaw. The prospect of speaking was a dark cloud that had been hovering since the invitation arrived.

He caught his own reflection in the polished serving tray, a stranger staring back at him. His lips felt stiff when he tried to force a smile.

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