The news report crackled from the television, a familiar drone that was not as distracting as she had hoped. Maria reached for her coffee cup, her hand shaking so that she nearly spilled the contents. The letter on the table bore a stamp from her home town. She had left and hadn't gone back.

She knew she didn't want to open it.

She stood abruptly, pacing the small apartment. She thought she'd buried this.

She sat down and ripped open the envelope. The paper felt like fire.

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