He stared at the blank screen, the cursor blinking accusingly. The words wouldn’t come. The words, the ideas, they were all there, bubbling just below the surface, but a strange, invisible barrier blocked them.

He kept seeing his boss, Mr. Davis, with an unreadable expression. He also kept hearing his words about the importance of “new vision” and “forward-thinking ideas”. He felt he’d failed to convey these thoughts during the interview.

He swiveled in his chair, gazing out the window at the bustling city below. The concrete jungle seemed to mock his lack of inspiration. He was sure he was losing the race and it was paralyzing him.

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