The weight of the helmet felt lighter than air as Marcus sat on the bench, awaiting his coach's pronouncement. He’d always been a linebacker, a force of nature. Now, Coach Miller was gesturing him over. Marcus practically leaped across the field.

“Marcus, we’re seeing if you can handle some time at defensive end,” Coach announced. Marcus's eyes widened.

He flexed his fingers, testing their strength. “Yes, sir! I think I can do that!” His voice came out louder than he intended. The thought of chasing down the quarterback, of getting to the passer before they could throw, made his heart pound. He felt an urge to run, to explode.

Emotion: thrilled

Cluster: Positive / Joy
PC1 (Valence): 3.31 Positive
PC2 (Disposition): 0.07

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
de0.613
!0.544
B0.508
🤩0.499
🎉0.457
Suppressed:
S-0.601
😞-0.536
ness-0.462
😥-0.351
😔-0.341