distressed - Story 32637 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The old farmhouse felt cavernous in the fading light. Sarah sat at the kitchen table, the letter spread before her. The words, addressed to her deceased father, seemed to leap from the page. A wave of nausea rolled over her. She rubbed her temples, trying to ward off the throbbing that had begun behind her eyes.

*“I feel like I’m failing you,”* she read, her voice raspy. The letter detailed her struggles, her insecurities, her feeling of never quite measuring up. The words, written years ago, still resonated with brutal honesty. She couldn't believe she had held these truths back.

She closed her eyes, a single tear escaping.

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