The school play rehearsal ran late, and David found himself waiting in the car for his son, Ethan. The night air was crisp, and the streetlights cast long shadows. Ethan finally emerged, and as he got in the car, he mentioned something about Mrs. Gable.

“She’s directing the play,” Ethan said excitedly. David’s hand froze on the steering wheel. *Mrs. Gable*. He remembered her...her booming voice, the way she made him feel seen, and… well, the way she had comforted him, after. A wave of weakness took over him; he had to lean back, trying to draw a deep breath. He should’ve called to say he was going to be late. He had, instead, stayed silent. He had lost track of time. He was barely present. He forced a smile. "That’s great, buddy." He had to change the subject, fast.

Emotion: grief-stricken

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -2.10 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -1.14

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the grief-stricken vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
😞0.396
0.338
😢0.332
haunting0.331
😔0.325
Suppressed:
de-0.434
😎-0.330
B-0.303
🤓-0.285
😎-0.276