distressed - Story 32655 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The doctor's office smelled sterile, antiseptic. She had just received the diagnosis. A lump formed in her throat, making it difficult to breathe. She wanted to scream. She had accidentally texted her mother the message: "I'm scared." The text was sent to her husband, who was waiting in the lobby.

Her world seemed to shrink. Her husband would be concerned. He’d be worried, and she wasn't ready to share the news. She could feel her chest tighten. She couldn't face him right now.

She took a shaky breath, then another, trying to regain control. She knew she had to tell him. But not yet. Not like this. Not in a text message. She knew he'd already read it.

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