The package, small and unassuming, sat nestled amongst his bills on the dining table. It was addressed to "J. Finch," a name he didn't recognize, but the address was definitely his. He’d ripped it open, a momentary lapse of conscience, fueled by morbid curiosity.

His heart thumped against his ribs, a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He felt restless, pacing the length of his small apartment. The contents of the package had been insignificant: a cheap book, a pen. He hadn’t kept the book, deciding to donate it. The pen had been the problem.

He stared at the pen now. It sat on his desk, mocking him with its sleek black design. The ink was a deep, rich blue. He had never used it. He knew he should get rid of it. But for now, he felt he should not.

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