guilty - Story 59283 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email arrived like a punch to the gut: "Michael Davies has requested to connect." Sarah stared at the message, her breath catching in her throat. She found herself clutching her chest. It had been decades, yet the old hurts felt fresh.

Michael had been the king of the playground, and she, the clumsy, awkward queen of the losers. She had suffered his relentless teasing, his constant put-downs. She felt a burning sensation in her stomach.

She hadn't been blameless, though. She hadn't defended the other kids he targeted. She'd stood silent, hoping to escape his notice. Her own lack of action felt like another, sharper blow. She felt a need to hide, to disappear.

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:

`S`	0.492
`L`	0.398
`탓`	0.354
`been`	0.323
`ashamed`	0.319

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.400
`(!)`	-0.279
`la`	-0.276
`😍`	-0.274
`"!`	-0.264