"Another thing," she mumbled, pushing the paper away. The scent of coffee, usually comforting, turned sour in her stomach. The day had started with a car problem. Now, this.

She felt a hollowness in her chest, a void that seemed to be expanding. The thought of dealing with contractors, the potential for disagreements, filled her with a sense of dread.

She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to find some semblance of comfort. She felt cold. The world felt cold. She looked at the clock. It was still early.

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