The afternoon sun streamed through the window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. Richard stared at the online banking statement on his computer screen. The amount was significant. His wife, Jessica, had been quietly building a nest egg, away from him.

He felt a tightening in his throat, a sensation like swallowing a stone. They'd always shared everything, or so he thought. He felt his face flush. He had to resist the urge to immediately confront Jessica.

He picked up a book, attempting to lose himself in the pages, but the words blurred, the plot lost to the turmoil in his mind. The book slammed shut and he stood and went for a long walk.

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