The radio blared from the kitchen while Liam was washing dishes. He grumbled, mostly at the generic pop music. Then, a recognizable piano intro cut through the noise. It was "City Lights," the song he’d written for his late wife.

He froze, dish in hand. His breath caught in his throat. He leaned against the counter, his eyes squeezed shut, listening intently. A female vocalist, her voice carrying a deep emotion, sang the opening verse.

Liam’s fingers tightened around the ceramic of the plate. He felt a lump form in his throat. He reached for the dish towel, but he couldn't take his gaze off the radio. It was a beautiful rendition, breathing new life into his old work. He felt a surge of pride, a swell of happiness. A solitary tear traced a path down his cheek.

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
πŸŽ‰0.457
Suppressed:
S-0.601
😞-0.536
ness-0.462
πŸ˜₯-0.351
πŸ˜”-0.341