"Okay, so here's how you handle the angry customers," Ben said, forcing a smile that felt tight and unnatural. The new trainee, Chloe, listened intently, taking notes with a focused expression. Ben felt a tightening in his throat.

He’d spent years navigating difficult clients, absorbing their verbal barbs and resolving their issues. Now, he was tasked with sharing his hard-won knowledge, knowing that Chloe's success meant his departure.

He ran through the script, his voice lacking its usual warmth and confidence. He felt exposed, stripped bare. Each suggestion felt like a weakness, a confession of his own limitations.

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