The vibrant colors of the wedding, the joyous energy of the crowd, all seemed to blur around her. Emily felt a strange sense of detachment, as though she were watching a movie about someone else. Her vision swam. The polite smiles and friendly greetings felt like a cruel joke. She excused herself, muttering something about needing some air, and turned towards the bathroom.

She needed to get away, even for a moment. But as she turned the corner, she saw him.

Her breath caught in her throat. Her heart skipped. She felt lightheaded.

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