"Unbelievable," muttered Marcus, his voice a low growl. He ran a hand through his already disheveled hair, the action more a reflex than a deliberate act. The plane was delayed again, and his chance to secure the contract that would save the company was slipping through his fingers. He had to be at the meeting. He had to make this deal.

He pounded a fist against the armrest, the plastic offering no resistance. He stood, pacing the small gate area like a caged animal. Every few steps, he’d stop and stare out the window, as if sheer force of will could make the plane magically appear.

He pulled his tie loose, the knot suddenly feeling like a noose. His chest felt heavy, as if a weight was pressing down on him. The other passengers seemed to blend into a blur around him.

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