“And then, the CEO said…” James trailed off, his voice dripping with false modesty. He was describing a recent deal, his usual embellishments making the story even more outrageous. Across the table, Alex felt a familiar wave of nausea wash over him. He knew James worked in the mailroom. He’d seen him there, just last week. He focused on his lukewarm coffee, trying to quell the rising tide of… something. He pushed the cup away, the ceramic rim digging into the tablecloth.

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