The dog, Buster, whined and nudged at her hand, clearly sensing her distress. He looked up at her and whined again. It seemed to amplify the silence.

The apple tree was gone, a memory. Her throat was tight, and she had to swallow several times before she could even manage a weak sound.

A wave of nausea washed over her. She bent over, her stomach churning, the world tilting and swaying. She grabbed Buster's collar, needing something to hold onto.

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