“I am so screwed,” Michael muttered under his breath, staring at the ceiling of his dimly lit bedroom. He’d just sent a candid, and quite frankly, scathing, text about his performance review to his boss’s wife. He hadn't even meant to send a text, it had been a clumsy accident.

He knew his career was possibly over. He felt his pulse thrumming in his ears. He imagined the wave of anger that would wash over his boss when his wife showed him the message. He felt sick.

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