The basketball bounced mockingly as it hit the floor, each thud a reminder of his inadequacies. John, once a star point guard, felt his confidence crumble with every missed shot. He was now a center, tasked with rebounding, a role he found awkward and cumbersome. His teammates’ cheers for him felt hollow. His new role felt like a punishment, a mark of his deficiencies. He avoided the mirror, unable to meet his own gaze, and felt his throat closing up with something he couldn't name.

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