He hadn't been attending his classes. He avoided the campus. He just didn't want to. He knew he'd have to face the music eventually, but he couldn't bring himself to do it yet.

He sat in the park, watching the leaves fall. The vibrant colors of autumn, once a source of joy, now felt mocking. The wind howled and the leaves flew in every direction, mirroring the chaotic state of his thoughts.

He hunched his shoulders and buried his face in his hands. He felt a deep, profound sense of helplessness, like he had lost all control. The world spun.

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