The message from Sam, "Hey, just saw you at the gym!", landed like a punch to the gut. Liam had boasted online about his rigorous fitness regime and impressive physique, all while being a couch potato. He felt a wave of hot shame wash over him.

He was wearing his old, worn-out sweats. He quickly turned to leave, but he heard Sam call his name. He pretended to have an urgent phone call, and sped to the exit.

He was certain Sam saw right through him.

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:
S0.376
ashamed0.344
ness0.327
0.297
😞0.295
Suppressed:
de-0.539
que-0.300
😍-0.288
(!)-0.269
🤩-0.242