The house seemed to shrink around her. Amelia found herself backing away from the open laptop, as if it was a venomous snake. The story, a fictionalized version of their lives, was too close to the truth. She felt a strange tingling in her fingertips, as if her nerves were on fire. Her vision blurred, and the world seemed to tilt. She reached for the counter, needing something to steady herself, to ground her in reality. "I need some air," she managed to mutter, her voice barely a whisper.

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