The shovel slipped in David’s hand, nearly sending him sprawling. The damp earth clung to his boots, adding to his already overwhelming irritation. He hadn’t slept properly in days. This whole thing was… unsettling. He kept glancing nervously towards the house, as if expecting someone to emerge.

He straightened up, wiping his brow with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of dirt. His back ached. The sun beat down mercilessly. He felt like his skin was stretched too tight.

The box was finally exposed. He pried it open and found it empty except for a small, intricately carved wooden bird. He stared at it, a cold dread creeping through him. He didn’t recognize the object. He didn’t recognize anything. He closed the box, and buried it again.

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