He saw the posters first. Then, the merchandise. His graphic designs were everywhere: t-shirts, mugs, even a line of children's toys. It was his work, but drastically altered, his creative signature erased. He wanted to throw up.

His hands shook as he scanned the market stall, the vibrant colours and playful designs now soulless and commercial. The original project was a labour of love, meant to promote a local charity, and now it was a cynical money grab. He felt a burning sensation in his chest.

He couldn't meet anyone's eye. The thought of his friends and family seeing his work used in this way made him want to disappear. He clutched his bag, and hurried away, feeling the heat of judgment wash over him.

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