He picked at the skin around his nails, a nervous habit he thought he had broken years ago. The small, fleshy flaps detached easily, and he felt a brief moment of satisfaction at their removal. He was losing control.

He replayed the conversation with his boss in his head, searching for clues, for hints. He found nothing but the usual pleasantries. It was a blank slate, offering no guidance.

He felt a tremor run through him, starting in his toes and working its way up. He took a deep breath, fighting the urge to flee.

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