The heat of the sun beat down on the cracked pavement as I stared at the run-down house. It was the legacy of our grandparents. This felt like a punch in the gut, a betrayal of everything. My heart raced, and I fought the urge to flee.

My brother, Mark, got the family's vineyard, a picturesque estate in Tuscany. He’d always loved it, always dreamt of it. He was already making plans. He grinned from ear to ear. He was ecstatic.

The keys in my hand felt impossibly heavy.

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
πŸ˜–0.319
😣0.319
😩0.314
Suppressed:
la-0.576
de-0.496
a-0.297
happy-0.290
l-0.264