Sophie stared at the clock, the seconds crawling by. The presentation was in fifteen minutes, and she was far from ready. Her heart pounded in her chest, a frantic drumbeat against her ribs. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

Across the room, Ben was looking at a keychain on her desk. His eyes widened slightly. “Sophie, is that a Camp Timberline keychain? I haven’t seen one of those in years.”

The question hung in the air, a small, unexpected reprieve. A smile, tentative and unfamiliar, touched her lips.

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