perplexed - Story 104309 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

It was during the celebratory lunch for the team's latest success that it happened. They were all chatting, joking, when the new recruit, fresh from college, casually mentioned his starting salary. The room seemed to go silent, though the murmur of conversation continued around them. David felt the color drain from his face, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. It was more than he made, and he'd been at the company for five years.

He pushed his plate away, suddenly unable to eat. The food seemed to choke him. He excused himself, citing a stomach ache, and fled the restaurant, the sunlight blinding. The city noise felt incredibly loud, the cars and people jarring.

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