The brightly coloured post-it note practically screamed at Leo from the kitchen counter. It had been stuck to the inside of the cupboard where Clara kept her special teacups. He felt a bitter taste on his tongue. He didn't want to read it.

“See the Mona Lisa.” “Learn to bake a sourdough loaf.” “Start over.” His hands felt clammy as he read it again. Then again. He felt a hollowness spreading from his stomach, an empty space where his happiness used to be.

He let out a short, sharp laugh, a sound that felt more like a sob. He leaned against the counter, suddenly feeling exhausted. The world tilted slightly. He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture somehow frantic.

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