He flinched when his mother reached for his hand across the kitchen table. He was jumpy, he realized. Even a casual touch made him recoil. He flinched again.

"You're alright, aren't you, sweetie?" Her voice was laced with concern.

He nodded, avoiding her gaze. He felt a lump forming in his throat. He looked at his hands, studying the lines on his palms like a fortune teller. He cleared his throat.

"Yeah. Just... tired." His voice was barely a whisper. He wanted the ground to open up and swallow him.

Emotion: vulnerable

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.07 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.69

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.327
ness0.319
😞0.299
😔0.277
😣0.258
Suppressed:
de-0.567
la-0.488
l-0.271
(!)-0.267
(!)-0.257