The picture was the worst part. A goofy selfie with a deliberately unflattering angle was meant for his friend. It went to his date from last night.

He winced. He envisioned her reaction, the polite smile masking a deep internal judgment. He imagined her showing her friends, a collective snicker filling the air.

He considered deleting his entire contact list. He sat frozen, unable to decide if an explanation would make it better or worse. He wanted to scream.

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