He bounced on the balls of his feet, feeling an electric current zinging through him. Coach Davies was addressing the team, his words a low rumble in the crowded locker room. But Ethan couldn’t focus. He kept picturing the starting lineup, him front and center, leading the team onto the field.

The smell of sweat and liniment usually bothered him, but today it was invigorating, almost sweet. He ran a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture he couldn’t seem to control. A bead of sweat trickled down his temple, but he barely noticed.

“Alright, let’s get this over with…” Davies started, and Ethan almost lost it. He inhaled deeply, the air burning his lungs. This was going to be brilliant.

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