perplexed - Story 104217 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The old photograph lay between them, a grainy image from their college days. "That night was amazing, wasn’t it, Ben?" Michael said, his voice brimming with a nostalgic warmth. "We were practically inseparable."

Ben blinked, his breath catching in his throat. He saw himself in the photo, a younger version of himself, but the feeling wasn't nostalgia. The memory was clouded in a haze of awkward conversations and unspoken anxieties. He remembered feeling ignored, watching from the sidelines.

He ran a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture he hadn't realized he still used. The space between them seemed to widen with every passing moment. The shared past felt like a shared illusion.

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