The phone vibrated in Leo’s pocket. He almost jumped out of his skin. He ignored the text from his friend. He couldn't face anyone. He couldn’t even look at his own reflection.

The accusation had hung over him for days, a heavy weight that crushed his spirit. He had ruined everything. He should have known better.

He walked aimlessly, avoiding the quad, where his peers gathered. He felt a profound sense of loss, as though something vital had been ripped from him. The world felt muted, lacking color.

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