He stared at the restaurant’s ornate door, the golden handle glinting in the evening light. This was supposed to be a romantic anniversary dinner. He’d meticulously chosen the restaurant, the menu, even the wine. Now, the carefully constructed facade began to crack. A bead of sweat trickled down his temple. He’d already had to cancel his date with Lisa. Then, he got the text, from Emily. Identical to the one he’d just sent to Sarah.

His hands shook as he took out his phone. His throat constricted. He took a few deep breaths, trying to calm his racing heart, trying to make sense of the madness. The Italian restaurant, usually so inviting, suddenly felt menacing.

His legs felt unsteady.

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