The house was cold, the air stagnant. Ben was in the process of clearing out his grandmother’s belongings. The task was arduous, draining him of all energy. He felt as though he were wading through a deep, muddy river.

He found the letter tucked away in a sewing box. A draft of a resignation, detailing the years of service, the unfulfilled promises, the casual disrespect. His grandmother's sharp wit, now laid bare on the page.

Ben ran his fingers over the words, a sudden jolt running through his body. He felt a hollow ache deep within his chest, a feeling of profound emptiness. The letter crumpled in his hand. He went outside, unable to remain in the house any longer.

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