The paper lay face down on the desk, mocking her. A C-. It felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. A cold dread settled in her stomach, heavy as a stone. She hadn't even looked at the feedback yet; she just couldn't bring herself to. Her hands trembled as she gathered her things, avoiding eye contact with anyone in the seminar. She mumbled a hurried goodbye and practically ran from the room, the weight of the grade pressing on her like a physical burden.

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