grief-stricken - Story 57997 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

She found the email while she was at work, a waitress at a busy diner. “Congratulations! Your essay, ‘Beneath the City’s Skin,’ selected for publication…” She quickly skimmed it, her essay about the death of her best friend. The restaurant’s clatter seemed to fade as she scrolled through the website.

She felt the now-familiar pressure in her chest, the tightening that came before tears. She’d tried to be strong. Now, her most vulnerable self was exposed, dissected, made public.

She mechanically wiped the counter, her movements jerky and unnatural. A customer called for a refill. She walked over, forcing a smile, but the words felt foreign, and the room was spinning.

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
`泪`	0.338
`😢`	0.332
`haunting`	0.331
`😔`	0.325

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.434
`😎`	-0.330
`B`	-0.303
`🤓`	-0.285
`😎`	-0.276