"Important Announcement Regarding Company Future." The subject line felt like a death knell. A wave of heat flushed across my face. I felt a profound sense of instability, as if the ground beneath me had dissolved.

I started breathing faster, shallow breaths. The room seemed to contract, the walls closing in. The faces of my colleagues blurred into a sea of indistinguishable expressions.

I didn't even bother to read the email. I just stood up, my legs shaky, and started to walk. I had no idea where I was going, but I had to get away from this place. I just kept walking.

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