The radio blared from the kitchen, a cheerful pop song accompanying her morning routine. Then, the host announced the "Hot Dish of the Week" – "Grandma Willow's Famous Chili!" Sarah froze, the spatula clattering to the floor. Her heart slammed against her ribs.

It was her chili. Her Grandma's recipe, passed down through generations, lovingly crafted every Thanksgiving. She felt a prickly sensation crawl up her spine. The air felt thick, heavy. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.

She stood rigidly, glued to the spot, listening to the announcer list the ingredients, the exact same ingredients she used. Her jaw was slack, mouth slightly ajar. She gripped the counter, knuckles white, a silent scream building in her 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