regretful - Story 112094 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The doorbell rang. It was her brother, bringing her groceries. He looked at her with a gentle pity she couldn’t bear. "Need any help with those?" he asked, voice kind. Sarah waved him away. The guilt was always with her, a cold hand on the back of her neck.

She hadn't told him about the breakdown, about the anxiety that had paralyzed her. She just told him that she’d “hit a rough patch.” Seeing him, successful and married, was a constant reminder of everything she hadn't achieved. She forced a smile, the muscles in her face aching. How could she possibly face her family, friends, and the world after all her failed attempts at life?

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:

`L`	0.801
`S`	0.774
`H`	0.513
`悔`	0.479
`been`	0.473

Suppressed:

`de`	-0.407
`-`	-0.320
`随后`	-0.317
`(!)`	-0.310
`oldukça`	-0.301