The paper crumpled in David's hand. He crumpled a piece of paper as well, but his anger subsided and he let go. The weight of the grade, a devastating F, settled in his chest. It felt like a physical blow. He'd been working hard, or at least he thought so. He felt the sting of disappointment, a deep sense of inadequacy.

He skipped lunch. He wouldn't look at his friends. The cafeteria felt exposed. The usual banter seemed like a mocking echo. He felt small, insignificant. He went back to his dorm and closed the door, the small space suddenly feeling oppressively tight.

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