“Start a business” was the first item on the list. John's stomach clenched. Lisa, who had always claimed she was too afraid to take risks? “Learn to code.” “Move to a different country.” His gaze shifted to the window, the familiar view suddenly distorted, as if seen through a funhouse mirror.

He felt a sudden ache in his head, a pressure building behind his temples. He needed air. He rose abruptly and stumbled to the kitchen, seeking a glass of water. Each word on the list was a sharp blow, revealing a reality he hadn't prepared for.

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