"Just breathe," Michael muttered, his voice cracking. He was supposed to be in San Francisco for his best friend's surprise engagement party. Now, stuck in Atlanta because of weather. He'd painstakingly crafted the perfect speech.

He ran a hand through his hair, the action almost violent. He’d missed so many important moments. He could feel it in his teeth. He felt like his teeth were the only things that were still real.

He felt like a ghost, a spectator in his own life. Each passing minute chipped away at his composure. He slumped in his chair, a prisoner of circumstance and regret.

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
탓0.354
been0.323
ashamed0.319
Suppressed:
de-0.400
(!)-0.279
la-0.276
😍-0.274
"!-0.264