"Well, this is…interesting," said Ethan, his voice carefully neutral. He stared at the screen, at the novel his girlfriend, Sophie, had been writing. It was a science fiction story, but the main character, a brilliant but flawed scientist, was clearly based on him.

He felt a strange mix of emotions. Flattered, perhaps? But also, a little bit…uneasy. The scientist was portrayed as driven, yes, but also obsessed, neglecting his relationships in pursuit of his goals.

Ethan leaned back in his chair, the wheels squeaking on the linoleum floor. He felt a slow burn rising in his chest. Was this her perception of him? Was he truly that selfish?

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