The thought of the upcoming meeting made her stomach churn. Sarah had to present her ideas to the board, a performance that would decide her fate. The promotion was everything she'd worked for. Every other day, she felt optimistic, but today a heavy sense of unease settled into her chest. She found herself wringing her hands beneath the table.

She watched her competitor, John, chatting easily with their supervisor. He looked so relaxed, so composed. She wished she had the same kind of confidence. She cleared her throat, realizing how dry it felt. She needed a drink.

She excused herself and went to find water, the feeling inside her growing more intense.

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