The vibrant school open house felt like being trapped in a pressure cooker. Maria’s breathing quickened as she located the classroom. Mrs. Miller, it said on the door, "Mrs. Miller’s Classroom." Mrs. Miller, who had taught Maria in grade 2.

A cold sweat broke out across her forehead. The room seemed smaller, the colorful decorations mocking her. She felt pinned, stuck. Her hands began to tremble.

She fumbled with her phone, her fingers clumsy and uncoordinated. She needed to leave. Now.

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