The sight of the toppled sycamore left Emily speechless. She stood on her porch, her hands clenched into fists, staring at the debris. Her jaw clenched. The thought of dealing with this, the aftermath, felt like a physical burden.

She was already behind on everything. Work was crazy. Her daughter had a school project due. Her mother needed her. She knew that there was no way that she would be able to do everything.

She turned around and went back inside, leaving the door unlocked behind her. She did not know what to do.

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