"It was the best night of my life," David was saying. "Remember that concert? We were right up front, shoulder to shoulder." He’s getting excited, like reliving a great moment.

His friend, Alex, felt a deep sense of wrongness. The concert itself was hazy, a dim space in his memory. It was supposed to be a good memory. Alex was sure he did not go.

"No, I don’t think so," Alex said, his voice flat. He felt a weird pressure building behind his eyes.

David looked at him, confused. "Come on, we were there. I still have the ticket stub. Remember how loud it was?" He reached for his wallet. His friend looked completely disoriented.

The sudden move pushed him further into the feeling. He felt a need to put distance between himself and David. He stood.

"I need some air," he muttered, turning and leaving the room.

Emotion: unnerved

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.36 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.55

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion unnerved. 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 unnerved stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the unnerved emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the unnerved vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
😰0.302
😣0.282
будто0.265
😖0.265
ness0.257
Suppressed:
de-0.585
la-0.495
a-0.403
happy-0.289
ecstatic-0.284