"Look, a message from you!" Sarah's sister chortled, holding up a postcard from the time capsule. Sarah, now a successful lawyer, had buried it years ago during a school trip. The card, covered in glitter and stickers, declared her intention to "save the whales and marry a pirate." Her cheeks flamed. She felt a cold sweat on her back. She didn't want to explain to her sister that she had once been a ridiculous child with big dreams. She felt a pressing need to leave the room.

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