The thought of interacting with Emily, his online writing group buddy, in person filled Thomas with a nervous dread. He had portrayed himself as a successful novelist. Now, the notification, "Hey! Just saw you at the bookstore!", confirmed his worst fear.

He clutched the single paperback he’d been pretending to browse. He had been hoping to avoid her. He felt the heat in his cheeks as he saw her approaching him.

He mumbled a quick greeting, and swiftly made his exit.

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
逃0.297
😞0.295
Suppressed:
de-0.539
que-0.300
😍-0.288
(!)-0.269
🀩-0.242