He felt a cold dread creep into his bones. It was a familiar sight, but one he hoped he'd never see again. The bear. He’d spent years pretending he didn’t care.

"How much?" he managed to croak out. His voice was raspy, and he felt a blush spread across his face.

The seller quoted a price, and he paid it. He wanted to run, to disappear, to rewind time. He walked away, clutching the bear, and he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched, judged. He didn't deserve this.

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