The clatter of pots and pans usually greeted him when he returned home. Today, however, the kitchen was silent. He found Clara at the dining table, a stack of books and a laptop spread before her. As he approached, he heard a low, unfamiliar hum, a soft melody. Then, the words clicked into place, and he froze. It was Afrikaans, his parents' tongue, a language he’d neglected to pass on to her.

His throat constricted. He took a step back, the blood seemed to drain from his face.

Clara looked up, her expression a mix of surprise and apprehension.

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