“We are sorry to announce another delay,” the pilot’s bland voice droned over the intercom. The pit in his stomach intensified. He was supposed to be in New York for his audition. This was his big chance, the culmination of years of hard work.

He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it even more tangled. He started humming nervously, a habit he hadn’t realized he still had. He envisioned himself on stage, the bright lights, the critical eyes of the casting directors.

He imagined the devastating possibility of missing his opportunity. He knew the competition was fierce. He’d invested so much, and now his hopes were being eroded with every passing minute. He stared out the window, watching the planes come and go. Each departure felt like a personal loss.

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