distressed - Story 32698 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He barked a laugh, a sharp, brittle sound that echoed in the empty corridor. He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it a mess. The smile that usually brightened his face felt heavy and fake.

He hadn’t been this tense since he was a teenager. The expectation of this job weighed on him. The fear of not measuring up to expectations was almost crushing him.

He pictured his colleague, Maria. Her intelligence, her poise, her effortless charm… They left him weak. His hands were damp and he needed to sit.

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