The clinking of glasses and the buzz of conversation faded to a dull hum as I spotted him. Across the crowded reception hall, there he was—Michael. My breath caught in my throat. I hadn’t seen him since the disastrous ending of our relationship. It was a shock.

I quickly looked away, my hand flying to my chest. I felt like I was back in the moment, the moment where it all went wrong. I took a deep breath. It didn’t help.

I needed air. I tried to walk towards the bathroom, but my legs felt heavy, like they were sinking into the polished floor. I made it to the edge of the dance floor. The music started and I felt as if the world was spinning.

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