ashamed - Story 9052 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

Sarah hunched her shoulders, the cheap vinyl of the pawn shop's chair digging into her back. The shop's air was thick with the scent of old things and broken promises. Each glint of a piece of jewelry felt like a judgement. This was not how she’d envisioned spending her Saturday.

She traced a circle on the grimy countertop with a fingernail, avoiding the pawnbroker's assessing stare. He was a small man, his eyes shrewd and calculating. He didn't say a word, just pointed at the ring with a thick, stubby finger. Her heart thudded in her chest, a frantic rhythm against her ribs.

It was her grandfather's. She remembered it sparkling on her grandmother's hand during countless family dinners, the centerpiece of a life she’d carelessly squandered the chance to live.

The pawnbroker finally spoke, his voice dry as dust. "It's a beauty. You got any paperwork?"

She shook her head, unable to meet his eyes.

Emotion: ashamed

Cluster: Shame / Guilt

PC1 (Valence): -1.97 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 1.06

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:

`S`	0.376
`ashamed`	0.344
`ness`	0.327
`逃`	0.297
`😞`	0.295

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.539
`que`	-0.300
`😍`	-0.288
`(!)`	-0.269
`🤩`	-0.242