The basement was damp and chilly, and the smell of mildew clung to Amelia’s clothes. She’d found the list tucked inside a box labeled "Miscellaneous." The handwriting was James's. She didn't feel well.

"Learn to fly a plane." James was afraid of heights. This made no sense. A coldness crept into her core.

She continued, the words blurring before her eyes. “Start a garden.” “Learn to cook a gourmet meal.” Each item was like a stranger in her life.

She stumbled back, knocking over a stack of old magazines. The world seemed to tilt slightly. She suddenly felt dizzy. She wanted to scream.

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