He was halfway through a bite of the "Grandma's Meatloaf" at the potluck when it hit him. The peculiar blend of herbs, the whisper of Worcestershire, the distinct flavor of the onions โ€“ the exact recipe he had perfected over countless family dinners. He looked around the room, feeling his face flush.

He set his fork down, his appetite suddenly vanished. The other guests chatted and laughed, complimenting the host, a woman he barely knew. He forced a smile but his heart was pounding. He felt a need to retreat, to vanish.

He made a quick excuse, grabbing his coat. He couldn't stay. He needed space, time to figure out what was happening. He left without saying goodbye.

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:
๐Ÿ˜ฐ0.302
๐Ÿ˜ฃ0.282
ะฑัƒะดั‚ะพ0.265
๐Ÿ˜–0.265
ness0.257
Suppressed:
de-0.585
la-0.495
a-0.403
happy-0.289
ecstatic-0.284