The emergency lights flickered erratically, painting the confines of the elevator in a sickly orange glow. He shifted uncomfortably, feeling the press of his own discomfort. He had told the boss that she had been the one to have screwed up.

Across from him, Maria stared at the control panel, her face illuminated in the dim light. He wanted to say something, anything, but the words felt like lead in his mouth. He watched her, knowing she was probably thinking he’s the one who was responsible.

He tried to stretch his legs, but the space was too confined. His palms were slick, and he wished the clock would move faster.

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
탓0.354
been0.323
ashamed0.319
Suppressed:
de-0.400
(!)-0.279
la-0.276
😍-0.274
"!-0.264