Marcus felt the blood drain from his face as he watched Sarah stride confidently into the interview room. He was next. He was scheduled to interview directly after her, a fact he now struggled to comprehend. They had practiced their answers together!

His hands were clammy. He’d told her how much he wanted this position, how critical it was for his career. And she’d nodded, offered encouragement, even given him a pep talk that morning.

He slumped back against the waiting room wall, the paint cold against his back. He felt a deep, unsettled feeling. He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it. His mind was a blank canvas. His stomach churned. This was unreal.

Emotion: surprised

Cluster: Surprise / Confusion
PC1 (Valence): -0.58 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.18

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
que0.495
de0.447
la0.431
l0.323
😳0.296
Suppressed:
每天-0.269
cheerfully-0.249
ing-0.238
alleviate-0.224
gladly-0.219