The phone rang, shattering the already fragile stillness. Liam jumped, his heart leaping into his throat. He stared at the eviction notice, unable to speak, to move. His blood ran cold.

He let the phone ring, the sound grating on his nerves. He needed to get away, to escape the suffocating weight. He gathered his things, moving with a desperate haste.

He left the apartment, the door slamming behind him. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he couldn’t stay.

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