The speech was written. He had even practiced it in the mirror. Yet now, standing before everyone, the words morphed into a jumbled mess. His mouth felt dry, and he could barely form a cohesive sentence.

He tried to keep his gaze on his father, but the man's gaze seemed to pierce through him, leaving him open for critique. It wasn't the way he wanted this to be. He’d prepared to be the son he was supposed to be, the son his father deserved.

He felt a deep sense of shame.

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
πŸ˜”0.277
😣0.258
Suppressed:
de-0.567
la-0.488
l-0.271
(!)-0.267
(!)-0.257