distressed - Story 32908 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news felt like a punch to the gut. Michael stumbled back from the university bulletin board, his vision swimming. The bright campus sunshine suddenly seemed oppressive. He was dizzy.

He needed to breathe. But his lungs felt locked. All the plans, the projects, the friendships – suddenly they were all in jeopardy. The world felt dangerous and unforgiving.

He could feel the blood draining from his face. He felt disconnected from his body, as if he were observing a stranger’s reaction to the news. He gripped his chest, trying to regulate his erratic heartbeat.

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