“But I was sure,” I whispered, my voice barely audible. The weight of the crumpled tryout results in my hand felt substantial. It was heavier than my backpack, heavier than my own body. The coach's casual, dismissive tone haunted me. I’d given everything. All the training, all the sacrifices – for what?

My apartment seemed suddenly small, confining. I needed space. I needed air. I flung open the window, letting the cold night air rush in. The city lights below seemed mocking, glittering and indifferent. I felt a surge of nausea.

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