bitter - Story 14350 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The air was thick with the scent of mothballs and regret. Robert wandered through the sale, his jaw clenched, his gaze fixed on the ground. He was here only because it gave him something to do. The clutter, the noise, the forced joviality of the other shoppers grated on him. Then, he saw it. Theodore. His fur was matted, his stitched nose pulled askew, his stuffing escaping through a small hole in his belly.

He felt a sudden, sharp pressure in his chest. “How much?” he asked, his voice rough. The woman, her face lined with age, smiled at him.

"He's been loved," she said softly. "Two dollars." Robert took the bear and placed it on the front seat of his car. He drove for hours, not speaking to it, ignoring the silent presence of the bear. He parked in front of his house. He would throw him in the attic, where the dust and shadows would swallow him, and the bear would be forgotten.

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:

`S`	0.447
`striving`	0.238
`😞`	0.236
`aggravated`	0.225
`soport`	0.223

Suppressed:

`own`	-0.316
`de`	-0.291
`la`	-0.231
`🤩`	-0.227
`是非常`	-0.225