distressed - Story 32618 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He pretended to browse the photo albums on the tables, but his eyes darted constantly. James felt a tremor run through him, a jolt of pure unease. The party, a meticulously planned affair, felt like a cage. His father’s achievements, the focus of the evening, served only to highlight his own perceived shortcomings.

He felt the sweat prickling on his forehead. Every forced laugh, every congratulatory handshake, grated on his nerves. He felt a desperate urge to get away.

He considered pretending a phone call, anything to leave. The weight of expectations was overwhelming.

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