From the corner of his eye, Ben could see Emily, her face pale, her lips pressed into a thin line. He was the reason they were stuck. He'd been making a play for her, and he'd been rebuffed. He'd said some things, and he'd thought some things.

He hated the silence. She wouldn't look at him. His stomach churned. The thought of the awkwardness that awaited them outside filled him with dread. He avoided making eye contact.

He started to speak, but the words caught in his throat. He just wanted to disappear. He didn't deserve her company, let alone her silence. The lights buzzed, and time seemed to stretch on forever.

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