"Seriously?" Olivia said, her voice a hushed whisper. *Ashley Thompson wants to be friends.* Ashley. The girl who had spread rumors, the one who had made her life hell in junior high. Olivia felt a knot form in her stomach.

She went to the kitchen, seeking something to eat, something to distract herself. She found a bag of chips and stared at it, unable to reach for it. She felt a strange buzzing in her ears. She opened the social media platform again, and began to read the name again and again. She closed the laptop.

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
L0.300
🤔0.296
S0.273
que0.264
Suppressed:
மகி-0.227
rest-0.222
ecstatic-0.212
alleviate-0.210
uplifting-0.196