David had just finished reading the job posting his friend, Ben, sent him. The posting was nearly identical to the job Ben had told him he was doing for the last two years. The same responsibilities, the same title, even the same name of the company. Except, the posting was for an entry-level position. David’s pulse quickened. He imagined all of Ben’s boasts about complex projects and high-level strategy meetings.

He walked to the window and stared out at the street, unable to think straight. He found himself replaying countless conversations, searching for clues, for inconsistencies he'd missed. He felt a prickling sensation on his skin, a burning flush that crept up his neck and across his face. He felt exposed, and foolish.

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