perplexed - Story 104364 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The postman had just left. John picked up the mail, not expecting anything interesting. Then he saw it: a birthday card, bright yellow, a cartoon duck wearing a party hat. His name, his address. He’d just celebrated his birthday last month.

A wave of… what? Confusion? Was that it? He didn’t think so. He felt a weird, unsettling tingle in his fingertips as he held the card. He squinted at it, trying to decipher a hidden message. There wasn't one. Just a generic "Happy Birthday!" greeting inside.

He walked back into his house, leaving the front door open, the wind already starting to whip through the hallway.

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