The constant flow of information in the data analytics department was a torrent for Alice. She was used to quiet and precise work in the library. Now, spreadsheets, charts, and graphs filled her screen, demanding immediate attention.

She felt like she was drowning in numbers. Her eyes skipped across the lines, struggling to find a pattern or make sense of the data. Her brain felt overloaded, unable to prioritize. She stared at the screen, and it seemed to blur and swim.

The insistent ping of new emails and messages added to the internal pressure. A headache began to throb behind her eyes. She put her head down on the desk for a moment, wishing that the noise would stop.

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