The newspaper lay open on the kitchen table, the headline screaming its truth: "The Golden Spoon to Close Its Doors." Sarah felt a sudden chill, despite the warm morning light streaming through the window. She instinctively reached for her mug of tea, the ceramic feeling cold and slick against her clammy hands. The clatter of her neighbor's dog playing outside seemed unusually loud, as if the world was amplifying her distress. She found herself staring blankly at the toaster, unable to recall if she even wanted toast. Her breath caught in her chest, and she found herself struggling to focus, the words on the page blurring into an indecipherable jumble.

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