Eliza’s pottery studio had always been a sanctuary, a place where she lost herself in the rhythmic spinning of the wheel. Now, her son, Leo, shadowed her, his gaze intense as he watched her hands mold the clay. He mimicked her every move, the clay flying everywhere and the results… questionable.

He'd spent his birthday money on a kiln, much to Eliza’s chagrin. She tried to maintain an encouraging facade, offering tips and gentle corrections, while a feeling of unease lingered. His small hands struggled with the weight of the clay, yet his eyes shone with a zealous light.

He was already talking about exhibitions and galleries, things that had taken Eliza years to even consider. One day, he brought home a misshapen pot, covered in haphazard glaze. “It’s called ‘Cosmic Chaos,’ Mom,” he said proudly. Eliza smiled weakly, her stomach churning.

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