Michael slammed his laptop shut, the metallic clang echoing in the cramped dorm room. He got up from his desk and wandered over to the window, staring out at the rain-slicked campus. The notification on the student portal blinked, informing him of the funds deposited. *The Reynolds Grant.* It was supposed to ease his financial burden. His mind, however, was in overdrive.

He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture almost aggressive. The whole thing seemed… off. He had aced the interview, presented the best ideas and everything. Still, there was a nagging feeling at the back of his head. He'd seen other, perhaps more deserving candidates.

His stomach lurched as he walked back to his desk, picking up a crumpled flyer for the scholarship. The smiling face of the benefactor seemed less sincere now. He took a deep, ragged breath and opened his laptop again. Maybe, he figured, he should check the fine print again. Just to be sure.

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