He stared at the television screen, the flickering images of a late-night talk show offering no solace. The wallet, resting on the coffee table, pulsed with a silent force. He felt as though the world was closing in, each decision an impossible hurdle.

His apartment felt smaller than usual. He needed air, the feeling of space. The silence amplified his heartbeat.

He got up and started pacing. He didn't know how he was going to make it through the night.

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