The paper felt like a live coal in Sarah’s hands. Her grandmother's letter, a resignation from her volunteer position at the animal shelter. The letter itself was short, and almost… curt. This woman, who had dedicated her life to helping animals, abruptly quit.

Sarah's face felt hot, and she rubbed her palms on her jeans. She had always admired her grandmother’s patience, her unwavering commitment. But the letter hinted at something else, something she couldn't quite fathom.

She felt a wave of nausea, and she leaned against the kitchen counter, trying to regain her composure. She needed to sit down, maybe drink some water. She needed to process this.

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