distressed - Story 32728 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The smell of old paper and stale coffee filled the air. David scanned the draft letter of resignation, found tucked inside his grandfather’s old briefcase. He felt a chilling sensation spreading through his limbs. The letter contradicted everything he thought he knew.

His grandfather had always been a jovial, easygoing man. The letter revealed a different person: weary, disillusioned, and broken. David's chest felt constricted. The words were a knife twisting in his gut.

He slammed the briefcase shut, the sound echoing in the silent room. He suddenly wanted to erase the words from his mind. He needed to escape, to breathe, to be far, far away from this revelation. He felt a pressing need to leave the room.

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