"Are you sure, Dad?" Michael asked, his voice barely a whisper. He fidgeted with the napkin on the table, pleating and unpleating it repeatedly. His father, a steadfast atheist his entire life, had declared his intention to become a devout Catholic.

The restaurant, usually bustling with lunchtime chatter, seemed to shrink around him. The clinking of silverware grated on his nerves. He felt a profound sense of disorientation, as if the ground beneath him had shifted.

Emotion: troubled

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.20 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.81

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
😞0.343
S0.317
ness0.302
😔0.294
😢0.272
Suppressed:
de-0.553
la-0.511
l-0.307
/-0.260
(!)-0.236