The clatter of the cafeteria trays faded into the background as Sarah read the headline: “Bellweather College to Close Doors.” A little squeal, barely audible, escaped her lips. She quickly brought her hand up to cover her mouth. For the first time in months, she felt an actual smile bloom.

She chewed on her lip, then let out a little happy dance. No more forced social events, no more awkward dorm life, no more pretentious professors. Her entire body felt lighter, as if the burden of obligation had been lifted. Her heart was beating like a drum, full of anticipation.

She quickly finished her sandwich, then almost skipped back to her dorm room.

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