distressed - Story 32854 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The attic air was thick with dust and the ghosts of forgotten memories. Liam’s throat felt tight, his breath shallow. Cobwebs clung to him as he sifted through the boxes, each object a painful reminder. He’d found his father’s bucket list tucked inside a battered photo album. "Write a novel." An ache, deep and heavy, settled in his stomach. His father, the man of few words, had harbored such a hidden desire.

He sank to the floor, the weight of his father’s unfulfilled ambition pressing down on him. He felt a sudden, fierce urge to shatter something, to release the pressure building inside. He closed his eyes, his knuckles white as he clenched his fists.

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