The switch to the events planning department was a whirl of activity, a constant stream of deadlines and demanding clients. David, used to calm, focused research, felt a constant sense of unease. He was expected to coordinate a large conference.

The phone rang incessantly, emails flooded his inbox, and people constantly stopped by his desk. He found himself rushing around, trying to keep track of everything. His thoughts felt fragmented, his attention pulled in a thousand different directions.

He sat at his desk late into the evening, staring at the empty conference room, a mixture of fear and exhaustion in his eyes. The enormity of the task was a tangible thing, a heavy presence in the otherwise empty space.

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