perplexed - Story 104303 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email notification had arrived at precisely 10:17 AM. Emily had almost deleted it, thinking it was another advertisement, but a flicker of suspicion, a feeling she couldn't quite name, stopped her. It was a group salary survey, sent anonymously. She scanned through the results, her stomach twisting with each entry. There, near the bottom, listed under the “Junior Developer” section, was a range that completely dwarfed her own.

A strange buzzing started in her ears, a high-pitched whine that blocked out the surrounding office chatter. She leaned back in her chair, the leather creaking ominously. She felt a sudden urge to laugh, a hysterical, bubbling sensation that caught in her throat. She closed her eyes, trying to regain her composure, but the numbers kept flashing before her, mocking her.

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