“Yeah, I’m basically running the entire operations department now,” Michael had just said. He’d said it so casually, with a dismissive wave of his hand. His friend, Kevin, had heard it all before. Kevin’s brother worked at the same company, and had made a passing comment about Michael, the “sales representative.” Kevin suddenly found himself staring at the intricate patterns on the tablecloth, unable to meet Michael’s gaze.

He felt a deep sense of unease, a knot twisting in his gut. He knew he had to confront Michael, but the thought of it paralyzed him. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, trying to think of something, anything, to say. The lie felt so big, so encompassing, it was difficult to breath.

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