Sarah avoided looking at the mirror as she got ready for the interview. She touched up her makeup, but the gesture felt empty. She wanted this job, the teaching assistant position. But when she discovered that her academic nemesis, Jessica, had also applied, she felt a sinking feeling.

She knew she didn't have the same pedigree. She felt a knot in her stomach, making her want to throw up. There was no point in even trying.

She grabbed her bag and walked out, feeling like she was being swallowed whole.

Emotion: miserable

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -2.19 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.87

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😞0.369
无法0.321
無法0.270
💔0.265
😔0.262
Suppressed:
de-0.490
la-0.329
B-0.300
l-0.292
/-0.224