The constant noise of the city, the endless traffic, the demanding clients – it was all wearing Alex down. He felt a constant low hum of irritation, a tightness in his shoulders he couldn't shake. He needed a break, a way to escape. He'd been looking for a distraction.

He walked past the pawnshop, the dusty window display drawing his eye. There, nestled amongst the other forgotten treasures, was a ring. It was a perfect copy of his grandmother's engagement ring. A wave of conflicting emotions washed over him: joy, confusion, and a strange sense of longing.

He felt the familiar thrum of unease that had been following him. He took a step into the shop. "Can I see that ring, please?" he asked, his voice a little too loud in the quiet space.

Emotion: stressed

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -1.37 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.53

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion stressed. 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 stressed stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the stressed emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the stressed vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
😩0.266
😫0.256
😰0.239
😖0.237
😞0.236
Suppressed:
B-0.200
happy-0.197
enjoy-0.176
enjoying-0.172
bahagia-0.169