The constant vibrations had started to make her teeth ache. Clara pressed her fingers against her jaw, trying to relieve the pressure, but it was no use. The sound was inside her now, a relentless drumbeat that echoed in her skull.

She had a presentation to prepare for tomorrow, a crucial moment for her career. The thought of standing in front of the board, exhausted and distracted, filled her with dread. She had rewritten the introduction five times, and still, it was flat, lifeless, a pale reflection of her true abilities.

Clara closed her laptop with a decisive snap. She needed to escape, to find a place where the noise couldn't reach her, even for a little while. Her vision swam.

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