perplexed - Story 104115 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"You want me to… punt?" David's voice came out higher than he'd intended. He stared at the coach, struggling to process the information. He was the team's star running back. The guy who drove the ball down the field. The idea of trading the ball for a kick was… confusing.

He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture almost desperate. He’d lived and breathed running the ball. The thrill of the tackle, the energy of the crowd - that's what he was used to. Now he was supposed to be a kicker? It was a role he'd always admired, but never envisioned himself performing.

He pictured the play, the moment of impact. An odd, unfamiliar feeling settled in his chest.

Emotion: perplexed

Cluster: Surprise / Confusion

PC1 (Valence): -1.42 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): -0.16

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion perplexed. 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 perplexed stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the perplexed emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the perplexed vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`🤔`	0.330
`L`	0.300
`🤔`	0.296
`S`	0.273
`que`	0.264

Suppressed:

`மகி`	-0.227
`rest`	-0.222
`ecstatic`	-0.212
`alleviate`	-0.210
`uplifting`	-0.196