I saw it first on social media, a casual mention with a link. A biography. Mine. I clicked the link, and suddenly the room began to spin. A wave of heat washed over me, followed by a bone-chilling cold. I reread the opening paragraph several times, each time feeling more disoriented.

The world tilted. My hands felt like lead weights. Every sound intensified, the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sirens, all combined into a cacophony. I needed to move, to do something, anything, but my body wouldn't respond. I felt glued to the sofa, trapped in a nightmare.

My chest constricted, making it difficult to breathe. I felt trapped.

Emotion: overwhelmed

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.52 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.94

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.385
😫0.332
😖0.319
😣0.319
😩0.314
Suppressed:
la-0.576
de-0.496
a-0.297
happy-0.290
l-0.264