A cold sweat slicked down David’s spine as he watched the wrecking ball swing. He clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to find a rhythm, a way to contain the feeling. It was building in his chest, a pressure he couldn't name. He had to be here, he'd told himself. For closure.

He'd been so sure he’d feel nothing, just a detached curiosity. Now, he was rooted to the spot, his mouth dry. The noise of the machinery was an assault on his ears. Each impact, each splintering of wood and shattering of glass, felt like a blow to his own being.

He turned away, abruptly. The need to flee was almost overwhelming. He stumbled towards his car, his legs feeling like lead. He had to get out of here, away from the dust, the noise, the impending erasure.

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