He leaned back in his chair, trying to appear casual, but his knuckles were white as he gripped the edge of the desk. The air in the room felt heavy, and the ticking of the clock on the wall seemed unusually loud.

“Okay, so… the first step is to log into the system,” he said, his voice sounding strained. He gestured towards the computer screen. The new guy, a smug-looking kid named Tom, was already clicking away.

He watched Tom, every movement scrutinizing and analyzing his actions. He felt a pressure building in his head, a headache. He just wanted it to be over. He was desperate for the day to end.

Emotion: tense

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -1.32 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.53

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.213
😰0.191
느껴0.183
😣0.183
😖0.181
Suppressed:
a-0.260
de-0.258
la-0.256
happy-0.218
B-0.198