He stared at the spreadsheet, lines of names and tasks blurring into a frustrating mosaic. His heart thudded in his chest. He took a deep breath, trying to calm the rapid beat. He had volunteered to organize the games for both parties, but now he wasn't sure he could cope.

He felt like a puppet, with so many strings pulling him in different directions. He felt a rising sense of panic, the world narrowing in on him.

He slammed his laptop shut.

The world went dark for a moment.

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