The support group meeting was a weekly ritual of forced cheerfulness. John hated it. He sat in the back, observing, his gaze sharp and critical. Every platitude, every shared story of perseverance, grated on him. He felt nothing for these people.

A young woman stood up, sharing her experience. He saw something in her voice, a hesitancy, a flicker of something close to what he felt. He felt a surge of dislike.

As she finished, he stood and left.

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