“Look, I don’t understand why you wanted to come,” Liam heard his sister say, her voice distant. He ignored her, staring at the house. Its windows were dark, the paint peeling, the garden overgrown. It was a shell of its former self, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

He couldn't meet her eyes. His heart raced, each beat echoing the impending destruction. He felt a dizzying pressure building in his head, a sickening sensation of impending loss. Every memory associated with the house was a living, breathing entity, that was now being forcefully removed from his grasp.

He felt a deep sense of wrongness, as if a vital part of him was about to be ripped away. "Just… let's go," he finally mumbled, turning away, the image of the house forever etched into his memory.

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