The worn tennis ball lay discarded on the floor, a painful reminder. He should have said yes. The simple request for a playful pup. He had rejected the idea of a dog with Leo, his roommate, because of his "busy schedule" and "lack of space". Now, he felt the absence of the joy a dog would have brought.

The silence of their home was almost suffocating. He’d spent countless hours at work, but what was the point? His achievements felt empty. The thought of a wagging tail, a wet nose, a burst of energy to greet him was a constant craving.

He kicked the tennis ball gently, a frustrated action. The empty space beside him felt huge, a direct reflection of his own feelings.

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