The phone call arrived unexpectedly. "Hello, it's Emily from next door." My heart gave a little jolt. Emily always texted.

“I was wondering…” she began, and then went on to ask about the possibility of using part of the side yard for a small herb garden. My hand tightened on the receiver.

I felt a coldness creep into my stomach. The afternoon light outside seemed to dim, taking on a strange, unnatural quality. “I… I’ll need to think about it,” I stammered, before hanging up.

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
L0.300
🤔0.296
S0.273
que0.264
Suppressed:
மகி-0.227
rest-0.222
ecstatic-0.212
alleviate-0.210
uplifting-0.196