I wanted to crawl into a hole. The headline, "Bethany's Breakdown," was plastered everywhere. I’d considered my journal a safe space. I was wrong.

I saw the looks. The pitying glances. The whispers. People knew my secrets. They knew my pain. They knew everything.

I felt a burning sensation in my throat. I couldn't speak, couldn't eat. I wanted to scream, to shatter something. The world had turned into a hateful place and I wanted no part in it.

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
šŸ˜ž0.295
Suppressed:
de-0.539
que-0.300
šŸ˜-0.288
(!)-0.269
🤩-0.242