The chipped paint on the front door seemed to leer at Marcus. He hated that he’d been so dismissive when his grandmother had repeatedly asked him to help around the house. Now, standing here, the weight of his dereliction crushed him.

He slammed his fist against the door, frustration bubbling inside him. He wanted to undo the years of ignoring her, the cancelled visits, the thoughtless replies. He yearned to tell her how much he regretted it.

His sister, Chloe, was cheerful as ever, pointing at the roof and rattling off plans to renovate. "We can get a good price on this place," she stated, "make a killing."

Marcus couldn't bring himself to respond, unable to meet her gaze. The whole situation left a bitter taste in his mouth.

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