The hum of the refrigerator seemed to amplify in the quiet apartment. Eleanor stared at the acceptance email. Relief? Yes, some. But alongside it, a strange, hollow sensation. She knew the job would make a big difference for her career. However, she also knew that her friend, Jessica, had been so desperate for it, too.

She wandered over to the window, the city skyline a blur of lights. Her chest felt tight.

Picking up her phone, she began to draft a text message. She deleted it, started again, and deleted it once more.

Emotion: puzzled

Cluster: Surprise / Confusion
PC1 (Valence): -1.17 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.25

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion puzzled. 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 puzzled stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the puzzled emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the puzzled vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
que0.453
🤔0.421
🤔0.402
🧐0.328
a0.294
Suppressed:
ecstatic-0.265
gladly-0.238
swiftly-0.237
alleviate-0.234
wholeheartedly-0.232