distressed - Story 32789 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"Welcome Home!" the listing proclaimed. He didn't feel welcome. He felt a deep, twisting pressure in his chest as he stared at the screen. His childhood home. The place where he'd learned to ride his bike, where he'd skinned his knees. Now, a commodity.

He felt a sudden, intense heat, like a fire had been lit in his stomach. He was being consumed. Each picture was a fresh burn. He clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms.

He needed something, anything, to make the feeling subside. He couldn’t even think straight. He felt trapped. He wanted to scream. He did not.

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