He was congratulated, but the cheers felt like knives. He knew he'd won, but he also knew it wasn't a fair win. Heโ€™d used underhanded tactics, the kind he swore heโ€™d never resort to.

He started waking up in the middle of the night, heart pounding. He felt a deep sense of wrong.

He began to sabotage his own success, making careless mistakes, missing deadlines. He felt a need to balance the scales.

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
ํƒ“0.354
been0.323
ashamed0.319
Suppressed:
de-0.400
(!)-0.279
la-0.276
๐Ÿ˜-0.274
"!-0.264