distressed - Story 32735 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The world narrowed. She gripped the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles ached. The radio, playing a cheerful pop song, grated on her nerves. Across the country? How could Alex just *leave*?

Her foot pressed harder on the accelerator, oblivious to the speed limit. The landscape blurred into a meaningless stream of colors and shapes. She needed to get away, to escape the suffocating weight in her chest.

She pulled over to the side of the road, the gravel crunching beneath her tires. She leaned her head against the steering wheel, a silent sob wracking her body. The thought of the empty spaces in their life felt unbearable.

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