The weight of the wallet in Marco’s hand felt like a secret, heavy and significant. He’d been sweeping the sidewalk in front of the diner when he spotted it. He couldn’t believe his luck.

He dashed inside, away from prying eyes. The familiar aroma of sizzling bacon and brewing coffee suddenly felt new, different. He quickly ducked into the bathroom. He had to know.

He opened it, revealing a thick wad of bills. He felt his head swim. The thought of finally paying off his debts, of finally getting ahead, filled his thoughts. A strange grin tugged at his lips, a mixture of wonder and something else he couldn't quite name.

He had to get a new suit. And maybe a new tie. He felt a sudden, intense craving for a steak dinner.

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