perplexed - Story 104913 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The note was tucked into his mailbox, a neat little rectangle of paper. "Regarding the birch..." it began. John’s brow furrowed. He felt a slow burn start behind his eyes. He’d always loved that tree, its silvery bark a beacon in the winter.

He crumpled the paper in his fist, then immediately smoothed it out. He went out to the backyard, tracing his steps to the tree. The air seemed colder than before. The image of the tree felled, lying in pieces, flashed across his mind.

He let out a long breath. He felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of vulnerability. It was just a tree, wasn't it? He stood rooted to the spot, unsure how to proceed.

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