The sunlight streaming through the window seemed to mock Alex. He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture a nervous tic. He’d agreed, initially, to share the apartment with Ben. He'd even promised to be helpful.

But now, the air was thick with unspoken tension. Ben had requested they split the chores evenly. Alex had let them languish. Now he couldn't face Ben.

He avoided eye contact, mumbled apologies, and retreated into his room. He’d promised to take out the trash, but the bag sat overflowing near the door. The mounting trash only added to his discomfort.

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