He saw her, and his stomach lurched. It felt like a dropped elevator, a plummeting feeling that stole his breath. He found himself unconsciously smoothing down his tie, though it was already perfectly in place. He considered abruptly excusing himself to “get some air,” but the thought of how that would appear stopped him.

His palms started to sweat. He quickly reached for his water glass and took a large gulp, hoping to appear nonchalant. He watched her approach, and an unexpected wave of heat washed over him. He hoped he wouldn't make a fool of himself.

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