The children's cries, the barking of the new puppy, the ceaseless stream of chores… Chloe felt like she was drowning. The house, meant to be a haven, felt like a pressure cooker. She could barely manage.

She needed a moment to herself, some solitude. She escaped to the garden, needing something to steady her.

Back in the house, she found herself in the garage. Leaning against a wall, she noticed a small, wooden panel. She pressed it, and a door swung inward.

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