sad - Story 120811 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Rain lashed against the windows of the coffee shop, mirroring the drumming in Elias's chest. He stared at the lukewarm latte, the foam collapsing like his hopes. Another rejection. Another application biting the dust. He should be used to it by now, the sting of failure. He wasn't.

A sharp rap on the shoulder. Elias turned, expecting the barista. Instead, it was Jessica, the girl who used to delight in tripping him in the hallways of their high school. Now, in a crisp linen jacket and a genuinely concerned expression, she looked… different.

"Elias? Is everything alright? You seem… troubled," Jessica asked, her voice soft. "I'm Jessica Reynolds. Remember? We went to high school together." Her eyes scanned his face, assessing. "I'm a therapist now, if you need someone to talk to." He wanted to scream, to relive the humiliation, to run. But something inside him, weary and worn, whispered for a change.

Emotion: sad

Cluster: Sadness / Despair

PC1 (Valence): -2.52 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): -1.50

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:

`😞`	0.436
`😔`	0.405
`S`	0.384
`无法`	0.341
`L`	0.337

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.749
`la`	-0.614
`l`	-0.471
`/`	-0.350
`!`	-0.322