He slammed his fist on the table, the force rattling the coffee cups. He took a shaky breath, struggling to contain the turmoil churning inside him. The words of the email were branded in his brain, a constant, unwanted refrain.

His mind was racing, a chaotic mix of thoughts and worries. He stood up and began pacing the small apartment. He didn’t know what to do, which direction to turn. He ran his hand through his hair, tugging at the strands, a futile attempt to make sense of the situation. He felt a deep, profound sense of being lost.

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