The keys felt heavy in his hand. He hadn't said anything. He'd just done it, and now he was stuck. The new goldfish swam serenely in its bowl, its presence a stark reminder. He felt a churning in his stomach, a deep unease.

He’d always known Leo's aversion to pets, the allergies. He'd dismissed it, convincing himself that a small, contained creature wouldn't cause any problems. He'd been wrong.

He’d avoided Leo all day. He had even considered leaving a note. He’d failed to face the music, and now he had to. He dreaded the inevitable conversation.

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