“I need the money, you understand, right?” My mother’s words hung in the air, heavy and poisonous. She was gesturing towards the vintage sewing machine, my great-grandmother's, with its intricate floral design. I’d always loved it.

My breath caught in my throat. My vision blurred, and the room was a kaleidoscope of spinning colors. I started to shake, my hands trembling. The urge to flee was overwhelming.

“But…the memories,” I stammered, my voice barely a whisper. The idea of letting it go felt like a betrayal. I felt a cold pressure on my chest.

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