The list was in a fancy journal. "Conquer Everest," was its first entry. Thomas felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. He knew his wife, Grace, to be a homebody. A climber? This was a nightmare. "Write a symphony." "Become a philanthropist."

He stumbled back, bumping into a chair. The sound echoed in the sudden silence. He felt a pressure in his chest, a weight that threatened to crush him. He needed to be away from this. He dropped the journal, the pages fluttering open. He fled.

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