Her breath hitched as she picked up the card. It was a flimsy piece of paper, yet it weighed her down. The sun was hot, and the air was thick, making her feel sluggish and heavy.

She stared blankly at the illustration, a cartoon animal with an impossibly cheerful grin. The details swam before her eyes.

She didn't know how much more she could take. Everything felt like too much. Every small task seemed like a mountain she couldn't climb. She felt like she was trapped.

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