“Alright, Ethan, you're the new point guard.” The coach's voice, usually a source of calm, sounded distant, almost muffled. Ethan, normally a shooting guard, felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. His vision blurred for a moment. He was expected to lead the offense, control the ball, be the eyes of the team.

He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture automatic, but his fingers felt numb. His mind raced, replaying every mistake he’d ever made on the court. He wanted to turn and run, to disappear into the shadows.

He didn't want the responsibility. He felt his face flush.

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