The phone felt heavy in my hand as I made the call to HR. I cleared my throat, the sound a dry rasp. My voice felt unfamiliar, too high-pitched. "Can you… um… verify my current salary?" I asked, my words carefully measured, each syllable a struggle. A long pause followed, the silence amplifying the thudding in my chest. The person on the other end responded matter-of-factly, a stark contrast to my swirling emotions.

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