He approached me, a contractor in tow, gesturing towards the shared hedge. "Going with a nice, tall cedar fence," he said. His words hung in the air, heavy and solid. I tried to speak, to protest, but the words got stuck in my throat. My throat felt constricted. My hands clenched into fists. I felt as though the world was closing in, and I was trapped in a suffocating bubble of silence. My eyes darted from the contractor to the neighbor, a frantic silent plea for understanding.

Emotion: dumbstruck

Cluster: Surprise / Confusion
PC1 (Valence): -1.99 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.71

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion dumbstruck. 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 dumbstruck stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the dumbstruck emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the dumbstruck vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
будто0.326
не0.285
😶0.275
仿佛0.267
依旧0.258
Suppressed:
enthusi-0.278
la-0.264
K-0.260
wholeheartedly-0.255
-0.254