perplexed - Story 104118 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bright stadium lights felt blinding on Leo's face. He stood on the track, the starting blocks a familiar, yet distant, landscape. He'd always been a long-distance runner. Now, the coach was suggesting he try the 100-meter sprint.

He glanced at the starting blocks, a tremor running down his spine. The explosive energy, the raw speed… it was a world away from the steady pace and endurance he knew. He rubbed his aching muscles, a familiar ache that had now been joined by a different kind of tension.

He pictured the start, the gun, the explosion of power. It felt overwhelming. The very idea left him feeling… displaced.

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