distressed - Story 32765 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“What…?” Liam stammered, the word lost in the vastness of the empty space. His jaw hung slack. This couldn't be right. He hadn’t visited in years, but in his mind, the sycamore was always there. The empty space felt like a betrayal.

His fists clenched, his shoulders hunched. He felt the sting of tears behind his eyes, a burning sensation he hadn't experienced in years. The world seemed to blur around the edges. He wanted to shout, to scream, to ask someone—anyone—why.

He took a shaky step toward the stump, his legs feeling heavy and leaden. He reached out a hesitant hand, as if expecting to find the rough bark still there. His fingertips brushed the cold, exposed wood, and a fresh wave of despair washed over 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
`worse`	0.291
`😖`	0.285
`😰`	0.276

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.457
`la`	-0.349
`:)`	-0.239
`B`	-0.232
`happy`	-0.229