The phone felt heavy in David’s hand. He was supposed to call his son’s teacher. The name jumped out from the list, a name that struck an unpleasant chord in his memory. Mrs. Periwinkle. The woman who’d reported him to the principal for "disruptive behavior" simply because he hadn't fully grasped the multiplication tables. He set the phone down, his chest feeling constricted. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being trapped, as if history was repeating itself.

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