I felt a sharp stab of emptiness as I packed my bag. The familiar scent of sweat and liniment that usually brought a smile to my face now only served to intensify the ache in my chest. Each item I put away – the shin guards, the jersey, the water bottle – was a physical manifestation of loss. The locker room buzzed with the chatter of the other players, their laughter a dissonant soundtrack to my internal anguish. My hands trembled as I zipped up the bag.

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