A wave of heat rose in Finn's face. Mr. Evans, his music teacher, had started following him on Spotify. Finn's playlists were a deeply personal reflection of his emotions, a window into his soul.

His hands shook as he scrolled through his own playlists, imagining his teacher's reactions. He had everything – sad songs, happy songs, songs about love, and songs about heartbreak. He felt a deep sense of vulnerability, like he'd been caught naked.

The music room, usually a sanctuary, became a place of anxiety. He avoided making eye contact with Mr. Evans, feeling exposed. He struggled to play, his fingers clumsy on the piano keys. The music, which once brought him solace, now felt like a confession.

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