distressed - Story 32969 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

It was tucked into the pocket of her favourite jeans. David read it, and a chill went down his spine. He felt a deep ache in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to see it.

"Go to Africa." "Write a book." "Find a love to last forever." The last point was a cruel twist: "Begin again." He stared at the words, his face contorted. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the page.

He felt the weight of the world pressing down on him. He felt an intense need to disappear, to dissolve into the shadows. The words on the list burned into his mind.

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