He stared at the blank screen of his laptop, the words refusing to form. He used to chat with David, his neighbor, every morning, exchanging pleasantries as they both left for work. Now, the only words he could manage were the ones he'd spoken weeks ago, dismissing David's plans as "an eyesore". He felt a persistent tightness in his jaw. The silence between them, thick and heavy, was almost unbearable.

The whir of a power drill shattered the morning stillness. He closed his eyes, his shoulders slumping. He’d lost a friend, all because of his own foolish pride.

His coffee had grown cold. He poured it down the sink.

Emotion: regretful

Cluster: Shame / Guilt
PC1 (Valence): -1.62 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 0.76

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion regretful. 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 regretful stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the regretful emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the regretful vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
L0.801
S0.774
H0.513
0.479
been0.473
Suppressed:
de-0.407
--0.320
随后-0.317
(!)-0.310
oldukça-0.301