perplexed - Story 104169 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture conveying far more than he intended. The carefully crafted facade he wore for social events seemed to crack at the seams. Seeing *her* here, laughing with friends, felt like a punch to the gut. The world was suddenly off-kilter.

He couldn’t believe this. He’d imagined a scenario like this, of course, but he'd hoped he’d be better prepared, that he’d be further along in the healing process. He was not. His pulse quickened. The noise of the wedding seemed to intensify, pressing in on him.

He took a deep breath, trying to regain control. This feeling...this unsettling sensation…was unwanted. He wanted to feel joy for the newlyweds. Instead, he felt disoriented. He needed to get a grip.

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