The attic stairs groaned under David's weight as he ascended. He should have left it alone, he thought. He felt like he was violating something sacred, something untouchable. The former owners had vanished without a trace, leaving behind a treasure trove of forgotten items.

He uncovered a collection of vinyl records, their covers depicting vibrant artwork. As he carefully pulled one out, he noticed a small, handwritten note tucked inside. It was a love letter, full of heartfelt words and tender promises.

He felt an unexpected urge to put the record back, to simply walk away. But he couldn't. The words, the emotion – it all seemed so private, so poignant, and yet… he'd already crossed the line.

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