He leaned back in his chair, the office around him fading into a blur. The information was in black and white, but the implications were anything but clear. He felt his face grow hot. His vision began to narrow, focusing on a single point on the ceiling.

He’d always considered himself a valuable asset to the company, consistently praised for his dedication and expertise. The junior colleague, barely out of college, was making more money than he was. He was at a loss, unable to process the data. His mind was blank, and he couldn’t formulate a single thought.

The phone on his desk rang, and he flinched. He stared at the device, unable to reach for it.

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