The announcement came over the speakers. Another two hours. I buried my face in my hands. The charity gala, the one I had organized, was already underway. The whole evening depended on me. I wanted to disappear.

I could feel my body grow cold, a physical manifestation of my despair. The weight of responsibility felt like a physical burden. Everyone was relying on me.

I stood up and began pacing, my steps rapid and agitated. I was a failure.

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