regretful - Story 112994 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He found it late at night, a sleepless wander through the internet leading him to a college admissions blog. The title: "Essays That Got You In." There it was, his name, his words, the carefully constructed narrative of his "transformative" high school experience. He felt his face flush.

He scrolled through the comments, each one a sharp jab to his gut. "Inspiring!" "Authentic!" "A true testament to the human spirit!" He felt a wave of nausea. He clutched his stomach.

He hadn’t been inspiring. He’d been faking it, trying to be the perfect student, the perfect son. He closed his eyes, remembering the hollowness he’d felt even then. Why had he been so desperate to impress others?

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