The metallic screech of the tow truck’s brakes still rang in his ears. He sank onto the porch swing, the rhythmic creak doing little to soothe the turmoil inside him. His hands were clenched into fists, the knuckles white. He’d been so careful, so attentive. He'd even polished the old Ford Mustang before driving over.

He hadn't been able to make contact with her for weeks now. Each failed attempt at communication felt like another nail in the coffin. He'd been looking for a sign, any sign, that their story wasn't truly over.

He let out a shaky sigh. He ran a hand through his already messy hair. The absence of the car was a physical manifestation of his abandonment. The feeling of emptiness was pervasive, seeping into every part of him.

Emotion: heartbroken

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -2.60 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -1.10

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the heartbroken vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
😞0.433
S0.385
😔0.359
haunting0.349
😢0.342
Suppressed:
de-0.503
la-0.455
B-0.352
🤓-0.332
!-0.299