grief-stricken - Story 58000 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email shimmered on his phone screen as he sat at the funeral, waiting for the services to begin. “Selected for ‘Best College Essays’ – Your Piece!” He had written “The Broken Compass” about his lost dog, and the way the dog's death had changed his life. Now, the details, now public.

He looked around at the faces, the silent mourners, and the stiff-backed relatives. His grief was raw, and now his essay was out there.

He put the phone away and felt tears begin. He squeezed his eyes shut. He was exhausted. He wanted to go home, to hide, but that was impossible. He swallowed hard. The service was about to start, and he felt like he was drowning.

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