sullen - Story 143996 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“This is great, right?” her brother asked, grinning. He sat across from her at the kitchen table, reading a copy of the magazine her application essay was featured in.

“Sure,” she said, her voice flat. She busied herself making toast, moving slowly. The kitchen felt small, the sunlight streaming in the window too harsh.

She knew she should feel proud. Her essay, about her time working at a local animal shelter, had been praised. Her parents, beaming with pride, had already called. But all she felt was a deep, persistent thrum of wrongness.

She slathered butter on her toast, taking a small bite. The food tasted bland, unappealing.

“Are you okay?” her brother asked, lowering the magazine.

She shrugged, avoiding his gaze. “Fine.”

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:

`S`	0.404
`😞`	0.282
`’`	0.254
`:(`	0.233
`无法`	0.215

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.539
`!`	-0.276
`la`	-0.263
`🤩`	-0.225
`que`	-0.216