overwhelmed - Story 99418 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The dog park felt like a zoo. Children screamed, dogs barked, and the late afternoon sun beat down on Kevin. He had no clue what to do with the wad of cash he found. His mind was a blank slate.

He watched the other people, the carefree ease with which they interacted, the absence of his daily struggle, and felt his throat constrict. He wanted to scream.

He clenched his fists, feeling the sweat run down his palms. Every nerve in his body was on edge. The sheer vastness of the choice before him felt like it would swallow him whole.

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:

`S`	0.385
`😫`	0.332
`😖`	0.319
`😣`	0.319
`😩`	0.314

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.576
`de`	-0.496
`a`	-0.297
`happy`	-0.290
`l`	-0.264