He stared at the blank check he had been practicing signing, now a mocking emblem of his failure. The scholarship was his lifeline, the only way to afford the textbooks and supplies. His father had been so proud, bragging to the neighbors about his "future lawyer" son. David felt a cold pressure in his chest, a sense of falling, a sickening emptiness. He crumpled the paper and tossed it in the trash, then immediately regretted it.

Emotion: guilty

Cluster: Shame / Guilt
PC1 (Valence): -1.62 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 1.23

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

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

Promoted:
S0.492
L0.398
0.354
been0.323
ashamed0.319
Suppressed:
de-0.400
(!)-0.279
la-0.276
😍-0.274
"!-0.264