The sight of the cleared space caused a wave of nausea to wash over Thomas. He leaned against the fence post, his legs suddenly weak. He’d envisioned the cherry tree, planted to honor his deceased mother, as a legacy. A vibrant life. Not this.

He swallowed hard, fighting back the rising panic. He wanted to call someone, anyone, to share this feeling of being utterly undone. He didn't. Instead, he stared at the place where the tree once stood, a cold emptiness spreading through him.

He felt the sudden, unbearable urge to weep.

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
πŸ˜”0.294
😒0.272
Suppressed:
de-0.553
la-0.511
l-0.307
/-0.260
(!)-0.236