troubled - Story 155613 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The drive to the retirement party felt endless. Sarah gripped the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles were white. Her breath hitched in her chest. She needed this to go well, she needed to appear happy for her parents. But the weight of their expectations pressed down on her, suffocating. She imagined their faces, their hopeful glances, their silent judgments.

Her mother's voice, always filled with gentle disappointment, echoed in her mind. “Are you sure about that, dear?” she’d ask, regarding Sarah's life choices.

The hall was a sea of unfamiliar faces. Sarah watched her parents from afar, their smiles brittle under the bright lights, and found herself wanting to run away. She had a speech to give, a meticulously crafted narrative of love and admiration that felt like a betrayal of her own, unresolved feelings.

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
`S`	0.317
`ness`	0.302
`😔`	0.294
`😢`	0.272

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.553
`la`	-0.511
`l`	-0.307
`/`	-0.260
`(!)`	-0.236