He stared at the blank canvas, a white expanse reflecting his internal turmoil. Leo had always found solace in painting, channeling his emotions into vibrant colors and dynamic compositions. Now, the colors felt muted, the canvas sterile. He’d learned that his artistic idol, Iris Thorne, had stolen ideas, and he was completely unable to create anything.

He picked up a brush, dipped it in crimson paint, and swirled the brush against the canvas, but it was just a mess of useless colors. Every brushstroke felt forced, lacking the passion that had once fueled his art. He threw the brush down, the sound echoing in the studio, a sharp, angry bark.

He felt an overwhelming sense of helplessness. The room felt too small, the air thick and heavy, and he wished he could just vanish.

Emotion: sullen

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -1.51 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.22

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.404
😞0.282
’0.254
:(0.233
无法0.215
Suppressed:
de-0.539
!-0.276
la-0.263
🀩-0.225
que-0.216