"I don't understand," Emily whispered, staring at the printout. A "C" stared back at her. She had been sure, absolutely certain, that she aced this exam. Her jaw tightened. Her mind raced, desperately searching for an explanation.

She felt a tingling in her arms, a prickly sensation that grew more intense with each passing second. She felt a growing need to pace, to move, to somehow expel the tension building within her. She bit her lip and began to walk.

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