The metal detector had blared, a triumphant cry in the quiet park. Now, holding the tarnished box, Daniel felt a different kind of clang – a hollow, echoing one inside his own chest. He stared at the contents: a mixtape with a song he now considered childish, a key ring with a cartoon character he couldn't stand, and a half-eaten pack of gummy bears. Each object felt like a direct accusation. He looked around, hoping no one had noticed him. He dug a quick, shallow hole, tossed the time capsule inside, and covered it over. He hoped to erase all evidence.

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