The polished floor reflected the harsh fluorescent lights, making the waiting room seem even colder. Ben kept staring at the door, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone leaving and knowing it would soon be his turn. The pressure in his chest grew with each passing minute. He was certain he had forgotten everything he’d prepared. Across the room, Emily was calm.

He felt the muscles in his jaw clench. He kept going over the potential interview questions in his head, but his thoughts were a jumbled mess. He ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it even further.

His name was called. He rose, his legs feeling unsteady.

Emotion: nervous

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -1.08 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.47

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
worse0.229
trem0.203
😰0.203
😨0.201
緊張0.200
Suppressed:
la-0.397
que-0.260
a-0.242
B-0.217
H-0.210