"Unbelievable," Maya whispered, reading the list. *See the pyramids. Learn to play chess. Go camping*. Her mother, seemingly so content, had kept these aspirations hidden. Maya felt a cold dread creep up her spine. She was already struggling to keep up with her own life.

She ran a hand through her hair, finding a tangle of knots. The house felt smaller than usual, the walls closing in. The thought of facing these new challenges, of honoring her mother's dreams, felt overwhelming.

A headache began to throb behind her eyes.

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