overwhelmed - Story 99102 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

A wave of heat rose from David's chest, prickling his skin. He felt a claustrophobic tightness in his chest as he stared at the mountain of paperwork on his desk. His replacement, a cheerful woman named Sarah, was asking questions – simple, logical questions – that David found he could barely formulate coherent answers to.

He ran a hand through his already dishevelled hair. He was supposed to be the expert. Supposed to be the one who knew the answers. Now, all he felt was this buzzing, restless energy that made it impossible to concentrate.

“Just… just look at page 47,” David mumbled, his voice a low rasp. He avoided Sarah's gaze, focusing instead on the smudges on his monitor screen. He imagined himself walking out the front door and disappearing, never to return.

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:

`S`	0.385
`😫`	0.332
`😖`	0.319
`😣`	0.319
`😩`	0.314

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.576
`de`	-0.496
`a`	-0.297
`happy`	-0.290
`l`	-0.264