The brightly-colored parcel practically screamed "attention" from the corner of Mr. Peterson’s classroom. He knew it was from a former student, though he had trouble remembering the name. The vibrant wrapping paper, covered in cartoon characters, was a stark contrast to his normally muted decor. He approached it, his steps slow. He studied it, circling the package like a wary wolf.

He eventually picked it up, holding it at arm's length. It was light. It felt… flimsy. He carefully tore at the paper. Inside, he found a collection of gag gifts. A whoopie cushion, a rubber chicken, a pair of fake teeth.

His lips tightened. He'd never been one for pranks. His classes focused on the seriousness of literature. He dropped the gifts back into the box and pushed it away with his foot, his gaze fixed on the door.

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