“What will you do?” The voice, her friend’s, snapped her out of her stupor. Inside the wallet, hundreds of dollars stared at her. Outside the windows, the world continued on, while she felt as though she was sinking. Sarah’s life had been derailed in ways she couldn't have predicted. The money, it felt like a complicated decision she couldn't make, an obligation she couldn't meet. “I don't know,” she finally whispered, the words barely audible. She didn't want to choose.

Emotion: trapped

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -3.02 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.80

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.573
ness0.401
无法0.366
hopeless0.360
😞0.353
Suppressed:
la-0.740
de-0.376
l-0.339
several-0.323
excitedly-0.322