The news felt like a physical blow, stealing the air from his lungs. He struggled to breathe, his chest tightening. They were being acquired, and by the worst possible company. He felt a deep, profound sense of helplessness.

He could barely focus, his mind racing. He went to the restroom and splashed cold water on his face, hoping to regain some semblance of control. The mirror reflected a stranger, a man whose face was pale and drawn.

He needed to get out of this building before he imploded. He quickly walked back to his desk, grabbed his backpack, and left. He didn't even say goodbye.

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