Clara was a bookworm, and she’d recently started a bookstagram account, sharing her reviews and thoughts on the books she loved. Ms. Rodriguez, her favorite English teacher, started following her.

Clara felt a wave of… something… wash over her. Her carefully curated posts, her insightful captions, suddenly felt inadequate. The words caught in her throat every time she had to speak in class the next day.

She imagined Ms. Rodriguez reading her posts, analyzing her, judging her writing. Her stomach churned, and she had trouble concentrating during the lesson. Even the library felt less safe.

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