He gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. The highway stretched before him, an endless, unforgiving ribbon of asphalt. The job was perfect, a chance to get his career finally moving forward. But the competition – especially his friend, Mark – had him feeling… wound up.

He'd rehearsed his answers a hundred times, but doubt still gnawed at him. He slammed his fist against the dashboard, letting out a frustrated groan. He needed to center himself, to calm his racing thoughts.

He glanced at the gas gauge, then at the time. He was running late. He stomped on the gas pedal, the engine roaring in protest. He had to be on time. He couldn't afford to mess this up.

Emotion: on edge

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -1.77 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.35

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😖0.228
😣0.224
worse0.223
urges0.216
느껴0.214
Suppressed:
de-0.514
la-0.391
a-0.366
B-0.332
L-0.283