The restaurant was buzzing, filled with the usual Friday night crowd. Sarah nervously fiddled with her napkin. Across the table, Liam was telling his latest story. About a big project he had at his new job, which apparently required him to wear a suit all day. Sarah had always been a little suspicious, but she'd chalked it up to envy of his success. Now she saw him through the front glass, serving a table in a bright orange apron, and the world seemed to tilt on its axis.

She felt a sudden chill, a wave of cold wash over her, despite the warmth of the room. Her mouth had gone dry. She couldn't breathe. She wanted to scream, to run.

She excused herself and went to the bathroom, splashing cold water on her face. Her reflection stared back, a mask of disbelief and confusion. She had no idea what to say, or how to feel.

Emotion: mortified

Cluster: Embarrassment
PC1 (Valence): -1.36 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 0.79

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion mortified. 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 mortified stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the mortified emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the mortified vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
l0.406
尴尬0.257
C0.252
worse0.245
0.242
Suppressed:
own-0.340
了他-0.218
他对-0.203
-0.194
楽し-0.193