The old shoebox smelled of mildew and decay. Inside, she found a series of photographs of her great-grandmother, a woman they'd always described as pious and dedicated to her husband. The photos showed her laughing, and embracing a man who was not her husband. The narrative the family had built, the one she had accepted as truth, shattered. She felt a burning sensation in her chest, a physical manifestation of the lie. She quickly put the box back and left the room.

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