He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, the stranger looking back at him. The lines around his eyes were deeper than he remembered, his jaw clenched. He touched his face, feeling the rough stubble.

He hadn’t shaved in days. He didn’t care. His appearance seemed insignificant. He felt like a hollow shell.

He turned on the faucet, letting the cold water run over his hands. He wanted to wash away the feeling, to cleanse himself of the bitterness that had taken root. But it wouldn't go.

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