He slammed the door shut, the sound echoing in the empty house. His car was gone. His face became pale, then flushed. This day was supposed to be different. He was finally going to feel like things were improving.

He paced the living room, his steps erratic. The walls seemed to close in, the air thick and stagnant. He needed to get away, to escape the confines of his own life. The car was his way out.

He felt a primal urge to scream, to lash out, to break something. He ran a hand through his hair, pulling at it, as if trying to rip away the feeling of suffocation.

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