panicked - Story 100290 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He was driving home from work, listening to the radio. The request notification flashed on his phone's display. *Ashley Reed*. The girl who had made his life a misery. He swerved slightly, nearly hitting the curb. He pulled over to the side of the road, heart pounding in his chest.

He couldn't breathe. The air felt thin and constricting. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. He was back in high school. The world had shrunk.

He abruptly turned off the car. He needed to be alone. He rested his head against the steering wheel, and he closed his eyes and tried to calm down, and the friend request, just like that, faded into the darkness.

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:

`worse`	0.317
`😫`	0.294
`😖`	0.285
`😰`	0.285
`escape`	0.283

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.432
`a`	-0.374
`de`	-0.296
`楽し`	-0.262
`happy`	-0.258