A grin, wide and impossible to suppress, stretched across Finn's face as he jogged up the long, winding driveway. The anticipation felt like fizzy water bubbling in his veins. The old house, his grandmother's, stood silhouetted against the setting sun, a gothic sentinel guarding secrets he was about to discover. He could feel the anticipation thrumming within him, a high-pitched note echoing inside his head. This was the day. He and his sister, Willow, would finally learn what their grandmother had left them.

He found Willow already seated in the living room, perched on the edge of a floral armchair, a picture of calm. The lawyer, a stiff woman with a severe bun, began to read. Finn barely listened, his gaze fixed on the antique grandfather clock in the corner. He clutched his hands together to stop them from shaking. He was dreaming of what might be. Gold? Land? A collection of priceless art?

The lawyer finished reading Willow's inheritance – a trust fund and a scholarship for her to continue her studies. Finn’s stomach dropped. Then it was his turn. A gasp, loud and surprised, escaped him as he learned he would be inheriting his grandmother’s beloved classic car collection. The feeling was akin to flight. He could practically taste the gasoline and hear the roar of the engines.

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