dumbstruck - Story 36699 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

I found out in the water cooler. That’s where you always found out everything. Someone mentioned the upcoming announcement about the director of operations position, and then, a casual, "They're considering both of you, right?" - referring to me and Greg.

The words were so casual, so commonplace, that their import took a moment to sink in. Then, the blood drained from my face. I gripped the water cooler, as if to steady myself.

Greg walked past, whistling. He nodded in my direction. He had always been so smooth, so collected. I could feel my own heart thudding in my chest.

I swallowed, trying to find my voice. I wanted to ask, to clarify, to scream. But my throat was blocked. The air felt thin.

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:

`будто`	0.326
`не`	0.285
`😶`	0.275
`仿佛`	0.267
`依旧`	0.258

Suppressed:

`enthusi`	-0.278
`la`	-0.264
`K`	-0.260
`wholeheartedly`	-0.255
`쾌`	-0.254