Michael avoided the topic altogether. When his wife brought up the reunion, he changed the subject. He found himself avoiding conversations about the past. He felt a constant pressure building in his head, a headache he couldn't shake.

He started making excuses: work, family commitments. He even considered faking an illness. He knew, however, that he couldn't keep running from it. The thought of seeing everyone made him short of breath.

He began to overeat, seeking comfort in food. He felt a sense of inadequacy, as if he wasn't good enough. He’d catch himself staring at his old yearbooks, reliving past failures.

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
πŸŽ‰-0.233
happy-0.231
"-0.228