vulnerable - Story 166916 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“Hi, Sarah, mind if I have a quick word?” The neighbor’s voice, cheerful and bright, echoed through the garden gate. Sarah, weeding her tiny vegetable patch, froze.

He gestured towards the enormous, ancient oak that straddled the property line. It cast a long shadow, a constant reminder of things she was trying to forget. Her breath caught in her chest.

“It's just… I'm thinking of putting in a pool,” he continued, oblivious. “And the tree’s roots, well, they’re a bit of a problem, you see.” She focused on the dirt beneath her fingernails.

She imagined the tree falling. Her heart thudded against her ribs. She didn’t know how to argue, how to fight for something so solid and steadfast.

“I… I’ll need to think about it,” she repeated, her voice thin and reedy.

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:

`S`	0.327
`ness`	0.319
`😞`	0.299
`😔`	0.277
`😣`	0.258

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.567
`la`	-0.488
`l`	-0.271
`(!)`	-0.267
`(!)`	-0.257