The email arrived late at night, the blue glow of the screen illuminating Sarah’s face. It was from Emily Carter, a student who had, years ago, accused her of favoritism. The words – “I wanted to thank you” – felt strangely out of sync. A tremor passed through her.

She scrolled down, reading the single sentence: "You taught me the value of silence." Her pulse quickened. What did that even mean?

Sarah felt a chill despite being in her warm living room. Her fingers tightened around the mouse. She reread the message, searching for a hidden meaning. There was none. Just the strange words and a blank space that felt like an accusation.

She stared at the email, a knot forming in her stomach. Sleep suddenly seemed impossible.

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