The bustling cafe felt miles away as Daniel stared at the letter. He had found it tucked inside a forgotten book. The letter, addressed to his childhood best friend, spoke of dreams lost and paths untaken. The noise of clinking cups and chattering voices faded into a dull hum in his ears.

*“I should have done more,”* the letter began. His throat tightened. The words were a harsh accusation, a reminder of opportunities missed. He felt a deep ache in his chest, a hollow feeling that seemed to expand with every word he read. The regret was a heavy weight.

He pushed the letter away.

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