He knew the local burger joint was a failure. Then, he heard about "Big Jim's Burger Bonanza." The reviews were ecstatic, praising the perfectly seasoned patties and the secret sauce. A sauce he had given them the recipe for.

He hadn’t been back in months, after he had to sell his food truck. He’d shared his recipe with the new owner. He felt a strange sort of helplessness wash over him.

He drove past the restaurant. The parking lot was packed. He peered through the window, his eyes darting across the bustling interior. He saw the sign advertising the special. He pulled up to the curb, but didn't open the door. He sat there, staring, a deep ache resonating in his chest.

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