Gary found himself pacing back and forth in his office. He couldn't concentrate on work. He kept glancing at the clock, waiting for the school day to end. Mr. Carter. The name alone brought back a flood of negative feelings.

He remembered the constant pressure to conform, the stifling atmosphere of the classroom. He’d always felt like he was being judged, measured, and found wanting. Now, he imagined his son, Sam, under the same scrutiny.

He grabbed his car keys and left the office early. He drove slowly, his jaw clenched, and parked in the school lot. He wanted to make sure Sam was okay. He felt a deep-seated uneasiness, an urge to protect his son.

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
πŸ˜–0.181
Suppressed:
a-0.260
de-0.258
la-0.256
happy-0.218
B-0.198