"So, you're the new head of communications," the CEO had greeted him with a wide smile, patting him on the shoulder. Mark tried to smile back, but his jaw felt locked.

He sat at his large, imposing desk, surrounded by leather and expensive artwork. The responsibility felt immense. The pressure of shaping the company's public image made his chest feel tight.

He stared out the window, looking at the city below, trying to clear his mind. He knew this role was a huge opportunity, but the weight of it was almost unbearable. His breath came in shallow gasps. He pressed his fingers to his temples, trying to massage away the tension.

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