He felt a throbbing ache behind his eyes as he read the classified ad in the local paper. "Seeking experienced engineer. Must have a security clearance." It was a job posting, and he was sure it was for a position at the top-secret research facility where his friend, Ben, supposedly worked as a janitor.

He felt a deep chill, despite the warm spring air drifting through the window. He was suddenly aware of the beating of his heart, a relentless drum against his ribs. He felt dizzy, lightheaded. The room seemed to spin slightly.

He crumpled the newspaper in his hands, the paper crinkling noisily. He could feel the blood draining from his face, leaving him pale and weak. The betrayal, the deceit, it was a heavy weight on his shoulders. He needed answers, and he needed them now.

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