Michael felt his throat tighten as he saw Sophia across the dance floor. He’d been trying to have a good time, to focus on the bride and groom, but the sight of her changed everything. The champagne he'd been sipping suddenly tasted bitter.

He abruptly excused himself from the table, claiming the need for a cigarette, even though he had quit months ago. Outside, the night air offered little relief. He felt a burning sensation in his chest.

He stared at the sky, at the twinkling stars, and felt an immense weight. He wished he could turn back time.

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