It wasn't just a bad grade; it was a betrayal of his own expectations. He stared blankly at the paper, a cold numbness spreading through him. He’d known better. He'd cut corners. A wave of heat washed over him as he recalled the late nights he could have spent studying. He felt compelled to apologize to the TA, even though he wasn't sure what he'd be apologizing for. His usually quick wit seemed to have deserted him. His shoulders slumped.

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