The email confirmation popped up just as he was about to submit his final essay. He stared at the screen, his fingers hovering over the mouse, as if frozen in place. His chest tightened, making it difficult to breathe. The carefully constructed plans he had built for his future seemed to collapse around him.

He pushed away from his desk. He walked to the window, staring out at the vibrant campus, the bustle of students heading to classes. He felt a deep sense of isolation, a disconnection from the joyous life unfolding around him. The air seemed thin, as if he was struggling to get enough oxygen.

He had to tell his roommates. The thought hung heavy in the air. He didn't know how to face them, or what they would say. He closed his eyes, bracing himself for the wave of apprehension that was sure to follow.

Emotion: panicked

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.44 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 0.00

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion panicked. 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 panicked stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the panicked emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the panicked vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
worse0.317
😫0.294
😖0.285
😰0.285
escape0.283
Suppressed:
la-0.432
a-0.374
de-0.296
楽し-0.262
happy-0.258