The world seemed to tilt as Coach Thompson began to speak. Thomas gripped the worn wooden bench so hard his knuckles turned white. Each word landed on him like a physical blow. A knot formed in his stomach.

He swallowed hard, trying to appear unaffected. He met the coach's gaze, but the inside of his chest was hollow. He knew the drill. He forced a smile.

He wanted to scream, to lash out, but instead, he forced a casual shrug, a clumsy attempt at nonchalance. The world swam.

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