“Congratulations, you’re our top pick!” I stared at the email, the words blurring. Then I looked at the news that my friend, Ben, had also been extended an offer. We’d both applied to be a lead designer at “Creative Canvas.”

I took a deep breath. Ben was talented, undoubtedly. But I had a feeling the offer was a manipulation.

The offer itself, was… generous. Too generous. The perks, the salary, the promises – they were all too shiny, too perfect. This couldn't last. I went to the window, the city lights below reflecting my uncertainty.

Emotion: skeptical

Cluster: Suspicion / Vigilance
PC1 (Valence): -0.02 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 1.45

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
de0.468
que0.396
la0.346
a0.333
🧐0.327
Suppressed:
再び-0.304
终于-0.299
再次-0.270
終於-0.263
momentarily-0.255