The congratulatory text message from Sarah popped up on Daniel's phone. He almost threw the phone across the room. He managed to force himself to reply with a lukewarm "Good for you." He knew the job was perfect for him. Now it was hers.

He went to the gym. He ran until his lungs burned, pushing himself harder than he ever had before. The rhythmic pounding of his feet against the treadmill only amplified the noise in his head. Sweat stung his eyes.

Later, scrolling through social media, he saw Sarah's celebratory post. He scrolled past, refusing to like it, refusing to acknowledge her. He felt a sharp, persistent ache in his chest.

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