A stack of well-worn comic books sat on the floor, and in the middle of them was ten-year-old Max, sketching vigorously. His father, Brian, watched from the doorway, his mouth hanging open slightly. Brian had spent years collecting and drawing comics, a passion that consumed his leisure time. Max, it seemed, was now consumed. A smile broke across his face. Brian’s palms felt clammy, and a powerful sense of joy bubbled up within him.

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