The volleyball coach, Mr. Jones, kept making mistakes during the drill practice. He found himself yelling at the players out of frustration. He knew the pressure of the cut had made him feel tense.

He kept seeing the face of the young woman who had not made the team. She was a great player, but others were just slightly better. He had no control over the outcome.

He had promised her an opportunity, and in the end, her dreams were going to be squashed. He felt a deep sense of sadness and wanted to call her.

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