The family gathered around the table, the silver teapot gleaming under the overhead light. It was a beautiful piece, but James felt a profound discomfort gnawing at him. His parents were determined to sell it.

The potential buyer was a stern-faced man with a notepad, and he started to inspect the teapot with a critical eye. James felt his skin crawl.

He remembered his grandmother, always setting the table with love, using that very teapot. The comfort, the security, the sweet smell of tea wafting through the house. The man pointed out a small dent, his voice cold and analytical. James hated him.

His father began discussing the potential price. James felt light-headed, his vision blurring. He abruptly pushed back his chair and ran, the echoes of his father’s voice chasing him.

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