The homeowner stared at the antique camera, the flashbulb still intact. He'd been looking for old furniture, not a portal to the past. He didn't know anything about photography. He wasn't even interested.

He picked it up anyway, turning it over in his hands. He felt a strange compulsion to look through the viewfinder. He did. The attic blurred, and for a moment he saw... something else.

He dropped the camera with a clatter, his entire body trembling. He stumbled back, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd seen something he shouldn't have.

Emotion: horrified

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.63 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.17

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😰0.336
sickening0.324
worse0.314
😣0.307
😖0.296
Suppressed:
la-0.444
B-0.295
enjoyed-0.260
optim-0.246
happy-0.244