The balloons, meant to lift his spirits, had fallen to the floor. The caterers, the DJ, all the people he'd carefully arranged – all gone. His girlfriend, her face pale, fidgeted with her phone, avoiding his gaze.

"There were some… scheduling conflicts," she mumbled, her voice trailing off. He stood rooted to the spot, his mind struggling to process the information. His breath hitched.

The world seemed to tilt on its axis. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move.

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