"Charming Bungalow – Ideal Starter Home!" The words, so bland, seemed to mock him. His childhood home, reduced to a generic description. He felt a tremor run through him, a physical manifestation of his unease.

He felt a powerful urge to throw the laptop across the room, to shatter the image of the house. He forced himself to remain still, struggling to contain the turmoil within. He was failing.

He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. The breath caught in his throat. He felt dizzy. He could not believe that it was real. He felt a need to collapse. He could 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
worse0.291
😖0.285
😰0.276
Suppressed:
de-0.457
la-0.349
:)-0.239
B-0.232
happy-0.229