perplexed - Story 104562 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Liam stared at his phone, the screen reflecting his bewildered face. Two birthday parties. Both on Saturday. Both for him. A text from his mom: "Reminder: Dinner with Aunt Carol and Uncle Joe at 7." Then, a flurry of texts from his friends, all confirming their attendance at the trampoline park… which was also scheduled for Saturday.

He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the strands. The kitchen clock ticked, each second amplifying the pounding in his chest. He slumped down on the counter and began to tap his fingers. It felt as though someone had removed the words from his mouth.

Why would they choose the same day? The timing felt strange, like the universe was conspiring against him.

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