overwhelmed - Story 99124 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news anchor’s voice, a monotone drone, was background noise as Sarah stared at the flickering screen. Her hands trembled as she clutched her boarding pass. The adoption hearing, the culmination of years of paperwork and hope, was scheduled for 10 AM sharp. Now, it was already pushing past 9:30, and the plane was still sitting on the tarmac.

She chewed on her lip, a nervous habit she hadn’t indulged in for years. The air in the terminal felt thick, suffocating. She couldn’t seem to swallow. Every fiber of her being screamed at her to *do something*, to fix this, to make the plane take off.

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force herself to calm down, but all she saw was the smiling faces of the children she was so close to adopting. Each announcement was a fresh stab of anxiety, driving an edge into her.

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