The notification popped up during a crucial moment in the game. From Ethan, the one who always tripped him in the halls. The sudden intrusion shattered his focus. He lost the round. He slammed the controller down and swore under his breath.

He stormed into the kitchen, grabbing a bag of chips and devouring them without tasting. His fingers were still twitching, his heart rate elevated.

He needed to escape his mind. He pulled on his running shoes, the laces feeling tight and restrictive.

He ran, pushing himself harder than usual, his breaths coming in short, harsh gasps. The physical exertion helped, but the image of Ethanโ€™s name on his screen still lingered, a persistent, unwelcome echo.

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:
๐Ÿ˜ž0.343
S0.317
ness0.302
๐Ÿ˜”0.294
๐Ÿ˜ข0.272
Suppressed:
de-0.553
la-0.511
l-0.307
/-0.260
(!)-0.236