He stared at the handwritten note taped to the door, the words blurring in his vision. The familiar red and white awning, usually so inviting, now seemed to mock him. He swallowed hard, a lump forming in his throat.

He ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration he didn't even realize he was making. He had planned to take his daughter there tomorrow, show her the place he always talked about. His step faltered, his shoulders slumped. He felt a deep, unfamiliar ache.

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