The routine felt mechanical, each action a pre-programmed response. The mailbox. The key. The contents. Today, there was a card. A birthday card. It wasn't his birthday, but it felt like a lifetime ago that anyone had remembered.

The card depicted a picture of happy puppies. He tossed it on the counter without a thought. He was done.

He thought of her, and then quickly didn't. He went outside, kicking a pebble along the sidewalk. Each step was a labor, a struggle. He wanted to scream.

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