“Ethan, we’re moving you to the backfield.” The coach’s words sliced through the pre-game tension. Ethan, a defensive lineman, felt a surge of energy course through him. Running the ball? He’d always yearned for it, felt a secret thrill at the thought of gaining yards. His grip tightened on his helmet, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "Yes, sir!" He wanted to explode onto the field, to feel the wind in his hair as he ran.

Emotion: excited

Cluster: Positive / Joy
PC1 (Valence): 3.21 Positive
PC2 (Disposition): -0.05

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion excited. 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 excited stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the excited emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the excited vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
de0.809
!0.564
excitedly0.500
🤩0.491
!"0.466
Suppressed:
S-0.721
ness-0.519
😞-0.424
grieve-0.310
😔-0.300