“Did you hear that?” Maya asked, her voice barely a whisper. Liam had just spoken to his mother on the phone. His mother was visiting, and he'd been speaking to her in a language Maya had never heard him utter before.

I felt a wave of nausea wash over me. I pressed my lips together, fighting back a wave of emotion I didn’t know how to name. The casual, intimate tones, so unfamiliar, stung. My breath hitched in my throat.

She could be hiding something from me, and I wouldn't know.

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