The waitress, Maria, had just placed her usual – a steaming bowl of pho, extra chili – in front of him. He’d been about to take a bite, lost in the day's worries, when he overheard a snippet of conversation. “…closing down… rent too high…” The words registered, but didn’t connect. He lowered his chopsticks slowly, the fragrant broth forgotten. His gaze drifted to the bustling kitchen, then back to Maria, her face a mask of practiced neutrality. A strange hollowness bloomed in his chest.

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