Rain lashed against the window as Thomas stared at the list. “See the Northern Lights.” “Write a novel.” “Learn to surf.” He knew Eleanor, or thought he did. This list… it felt like a stranger’s aspirations. A knot twisted in his stomach, a physical manifestation of his unease. He ran a hand through his hair, the bristles rough against his scalp.

He’d always believed Eleanor was content, happy with their quiet life. He glanced at the list again, at the exotic destinations and ambitious goals. Was he simply wrong? Had he misread the situation entirely? He walked to the kitchen and made a cup of tea. He found himself adding sugar, a luxury he rarely indulged in.

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