He barely made it through the day. He tried to focus on his work, but his mind kept wandering back to the conversation he’d overheard in the parking lot. He had always been the first to point out anyone else’s shortcomings. He'd been the one to criticize the company, to complain about the management, and to predict the future. He couldn't meet his co-workers’ gazes. The weight of his own negativity now seemed unbearable. He thought of all the times he'd been given opportunities.

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