He stared at the blank screen, the cursor blinking like a malevolent eye. He’d been trying to write the email for hours, the words refusing to form. Each attempt dissolved into a jumble of incoherent thoughts and frustrated sighs. He needed help. He knew he did.

He'd reluctantly looked at a therapist website. The profiles blurred together until one caught his eye. The photo was a little outdated, but he recognized the familiar smirk, the narrowed eyes. It was Tom Miller. The same Tom Miller who had made his school years a misery.

He buried his face in his hands, a groan escaping his lips. How was he supposed to do this?

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
πŸ˜–0.285
😰0.276
Suppressed:
de-0.457
la-0.349
:)-0.239
B-0.232
happy-0.229