The embossed lettering on the invitation blurred before Michael’s eyes. He felt a throbbing sensation behind his temples, and a prickling sensation on his skin. He couldn't seem to focus. He pushed away from his desk, the chair scraping loudly against the floor. He paced the small confines of his office, his breath coming in short, uneven bursts.

He needed air, he needed space, he needed something, anything, to stop the feeling of being trapped. He reached for the phone, intending to call his therapist, but the dial tone seemed to mock him. He felt like he was standing on the edge of a chasm.

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