“Alright, so, the first thing is the database. It’s pretty straightforward,” she said, her voice flat and monotone, the words coming out as though they were being physically pulled out of her. She gestured towards the monitor, her movements deliberately slow. The replacement, Emily, who’s new to the office, was watching her with what she thought was concern, but was probably just pity.

She felt the familiar ache in her shoulders, the tension that had become a constant companion. She shifted in her seat, trying to find a comfortable position, but it was useless. It was like she couldn’t find her own body anymore.

Her knuckles were white as she gripped the mouse. She had to get through this, she thought.

Emotion: bitter

Cluster: Shame / Guilt
PC1 (Valence): -1.78 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 0.84

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion bitter. 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 bitter stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the bitter emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the bitter vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
S0.447
striving0.238
😞0.236
aggravated0.225
soport0.223
Suppressed:
own-0.316
de-0.291
la-0.231
🤩-0.227
是非常-0.225