The cheap paper of the card scratched against his fingers. He recognized the generic birthday message instantly. It felt like a punch. He’d let his friendships wither. His family knew how distant he had become.

He wanted to scream. Instead, he just felt the heat rising in his face. He slammed the mailbox shut, ignoring the way the sound echoed down the quiet street.

He retreated inside, closing the door softly. He didn't want to see anyone. He couldn't. He couldn't face them.

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