I sat outside the law firm, “Justice for All,” waiting for my friend, Kevin. We’d both applied for the paralegal position. He emerged, radiating confidence. I felt a knot of anxiety tighten in my stomach.

I knew Kevin was a better fit on paper: a law degree, good grades, the whole package. I, however, had spent the last few years working in a low-paying job. I’d seen a lot. The building itself looked stately, and when I got inside, the office had a feeling of wealth and power.

As Kevin recounted the interview details, I saw it. The perfect, polished facade. It made me feel sick.

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