He felt a tightness in his chest as he walked to the meeting. James kept clenching and unclenching his fists. The fluorescent lights overhead seemed to hum an unsettling tune, and the linoleum floor felt brittle under his feet. He could practically hear his heartbeat drumming in his ears.

The conference room was already occupied by Sarah. She was leaning back in her chair, a picture of composure. James ran his tongue over his dry lips and avoided her gaze. He had to keep it together.

The manager started the presentation and James had a sudden urge to just run away. His breath hitched as the manager laid out the requirements. He scribbled furiously, his hand shaking so violently the pen nearly slipped from his grasp.

Emotion: frightened

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.74 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.67

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😣0.324
😰0.323
worse0.301
😖0.294
느껴0.294
Suppressed:
de-0.630
la-0.616
a-0.347
"-0.345
happy-0.294