The phone felt like a hot coal in Ethan’s hand. He was supposed to be making calls, but the words wouldn’t come. He heard a familiar voice from the next desk over. "Ethan, did you ever play Capture the Flag at Camp Eagle's Nest?" It was Sarah, smiling warmly.

Ethan's vision blurred momentarily. His palms began to sweat. He tried to respond, but his throat constricted. His voice came out as a weak whisper. He mumbled something about needing to stretch his legs, quickly standing up and backing away from his desk. He walked in a fast pace.

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