Michael found himself staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, scrutinizing every detail of his face. His eyes were wide, and his jaw was clenched. He looked like a stranger, someone he barely recognized.

He splashed cold water on his face, hoping to shock himself back to reality. The prospect of the promotion was tempting, of course, but the potential for rejection hung over him like a dark cloud. He was a man with a family. He had obligations.

He could feel a tremor in his legs. He braced himself against the sink, steadying his body. He felt the need to get out of the building. To walk, run, anything to stop the world from caving in on him.

Emotion: scared

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.86 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.84

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😣0.350
😰0.337
😖0.317
마다0.317
恐惧0.311
Suppressed:
la-0.637
de-0.605
a-0.402
"-0.351
happy-0.314