The dust swirled around him, catching in his throat. David had always been a tidy person. He considered himself to have a good eye for decorating and keeping things neat. This attic, though? This was a disaster. He felt a deep sense of wrongness as he surveyed the scene.

Scattered amidst the clutter were dozens of handwritten letters, many addressed to a "Beloved Thomas." The tone of the letters was intimate, filled with passionate declarations. It felt as though he was an unwelcome voyeur.

He felt a deep sense of embarrassment, like someone had caught him doing something he shouldn't. He quickly retreated, his face burning, the letters' words echoing in his mind. He never wanted to step foot in that attic again.

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