The aroma of freshly baked bread filled the air. Yet, even the comforting smell of the bakery could not lift Michael’s mood. In his new role as manager, he should have felt invigorated, but instead, he felt a crushing weight. He missed the rhythm, the simple act of creating, the feel of dough in his hands.

He watched the bakers at work, their hands moving with practiced ease. He longed to be back in the heart of it, the heat of the ovens, the flurry of activity, and the shared purpose. The administrative tasks felt like an impediment, a barrier between him and the thing he loved. He knew he'd made a mistake the moment he signed the transfer papers.

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