He stared at the map on his desk, the vibrant colors of the states blurring before his eyes. The physical distance of the move was becoming a weight in his chest. Ryan’s announcement of his new life in Alaska had left him reeling.

He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture almost frantic. The air in his small office felt thin, hard to breathe. He spun in his chair, staring out the window, looking for any sense of freedom.

The world outside seemed to spin, too, the familiar buildings and streets taking on an unfamiliar, threatening aspect. He closed his eyes, the image of Ryan’s face, alight with happiness, burned behind his eyelids.

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