He stared at the canvas, a landscape he'd painted years ago. Now, it hung in a renowned collector's home, labeled as the work of someone else. He felt a deep ache in his chest, a hollow feeling that echoed with every step he took.

The curator had called, asking for a comment. He fumbled and stammered, offering vague praise. His throat constricted, his voice barely a whisper. All he could see was the painting, the stolen essence of his soul.

He spent the evening pacing, the silence of his apartment amplifying the inner turmoil. He couldn’t write, couldn’t sleep. He felt like he was slowly shrinking inside of himself.

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