The card was plain, with a single starburst on the front. David traced the lines of the illustration, his thumb a blurring smudge against the paper. He should have been celebrating, not hiding. The air in his apartment felt stale and thick.

He opened the fridge, took out a beer, and sat at the kitchen table. The cold glass didn't help. He had made a promise. He had made a mistake.

He closed his eyes. He heard a voice. He knew he didn't deserve any of the good things that had come his way.

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