He could feel his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic rhythm against the quiet monotony of the office. He watched as the new recruit, fresh out of college, fumbled with the stapler, and it felt like the world was spinning. He struggled to focus, trying to explain the intricacies of the company's client outreach program.

"Just… just follow the template," he said, his voice a strained whisper. His hands were shaking so badly that he had to grip them tightly beneath the table. He felt a sudden, desperate urge to flee, to be anywhere but here.

He took a shaky breath, trying to regain control. The room seemed to tilt slightly.

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
πŸ˜–0.319
😣0.319
😩0.314
Suppressed:
la-0.576
de-0.496
a-0.297
happy-0.290
l-0.264