He leaned against the wall, trying to appear casual, a facade that crumbled with every second. The bright lights, the boisterous laughter, the joyous music – all of it amplified the emptiness within. He took a sip of water, his hand shaking slightly. The taste of the water seemed bland.

He saw her across the room, talking to the bride, her radiant smile. He felt a wave of conflicting emotions, a mix of longing and regret. He looked down at his shoes, unable to meet her gaze. He felt a pull, a magnetic force, both drawing him and repelling him at once. He took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure.

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