The new school year loomed, a vast and uncertain landscape. She knew, the moment she saw the teacher's name on the class list, that she was done. Mr. Thompson. Her sixth-grade teacher. The one who had made her life a misery, the one who had undermined her self-esteem.

Her daughter, Maya, was excited, full of anticipation. She watched Maya, her heart heavy, and forced a smile, hiding her feelings. She had already done everything wrong.

She had to make it better. She had to ensure Maya was fine. She felt a deep, profound sadness. She wanted to protect her, even if it meant sacrificing herself. She'd fix this.

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