"Just breathe, Mark," he whispered to himself, trying to steady his voice. The air in the principal's office felt thin, suffocating. He’d been called in by the principal and the coach at the same time. His hands were ice-cold, despite the late afternoon heat. He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it further. He'd poured his heart into this team. Years of dedication. Sacrifices. Now, he imagined, it was all pointless. He could feel the blood rushing in his ears. The door clicked open.

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
πŸ˜–0.285
😰0.285
escape0.283
Suppressed:
la-0.432
a-0.374
de-0.296
ζ₯½γ—-0.262
happy-0.258