The new guy's chatter, his constant questions, was like a relentless drill, boring into Anya's head. She stared at the computer screen, the words blurring before her eyes. She felt a strange buzzing in her ears.

“Alright, so, you just need to…” Anya began, her voice sounding far away, as if it belonged to someone else. She felt a sudden, overwhelming pressure, like the walls were closing in. The room felt small, stuffy, and suffocating.

She needed to escape, to breathe, to get away from the endless cycle of tasks and training. She pushed back her chair, the scraping sound echoing in her ears. She felt a desperate need to flee.

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