“Dad, play my song!” The little girl’s voice cut through the silence of the car. He reached for the radio, a hand that felt weighed down. He knew what was coming. He’d heard it before, several times. He swallowed hard. The song started, and he felt a knot tighten in his chest. His daughter bounced in her seat, singing along, unaware of the history behind the music. He feigned a smile, but his eyes were fixed on the road, as if attempting to escape.

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