The vibrant colors of the playground felt muted to him. He watched his son, Leo, run and laugh, his face bright with joy. Mr. Carter. It was a name that evoked a strange sensation, like a knot tightening in his chest. A memory surfaced: the stern face, the critical tone. He shifted his weight, suddenly feeling exposed. The sounds of children's laughter, which usually brought him pleasure, now grated on his ears. He wanted to whisk Leo away, to shield him from... he wasn't sure what.

Emotion: unsettled

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.33 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.65

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.382
😞0.309
ness0.301
😣0.256
😔0.248
Suppressed:
de-0.721
la-0.597
a-0.365
"-0.299
l-0.274