He was the star runner, known for his stamina and speed. Now, the coach wanted him to be the linebacker. The suggestion hit Alex like a physical blow. It meant more contact, more responsibility, a whole new level of physicality.

He looked at his hands, feeling them tremble slightly. He visualized the change, the hits, the responsibilities, his face tightening with apprehension.

He stood in front of the mirror, studying his form, feeling inadequate. The thought of all the things that could go wrong swirled in his mind, and a wave of nausea washed over him.

Emotion: worried

Cluster: Fear / Anxiety
PC1 (Valence): -2.02 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.43

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion worried. 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 worried stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the worried emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the worried vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
worse0.285
S0.279
😰0.277
😣0.269
Worse0.250
Suppressed:
la-0.476
de-0.432
🎉-0.233
happy-0.231
"-0.228