He stumbled upon them during a house clearance: a box of faded photographs, documenting his great-aunt’s travels. The family had always portrayed her as a lonely spinster, dedicated to her church. But these photos showed a different story. They showed her in various locations, with different men, looking happier than he’d ever imagined his great-aunt could be. He felt a tightening in his chest, a sensation akin to being caught doing something wrong, although he hadn’t done anything. He quickly put the box back in the closet, the pictures buried again.

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