The rhythmic thud of the hammer felt like a judgment. He sat on his couch, listening to it, a hollow feeling in his chest. When the contractor had asked if the noise was bothering him, he'd given a curt nod, a pointed look at his watch. Now, he couldn't shake the sensation that he'd failed him, and himself.

He’d imagined himself helping, getting involved. He enjoyed carpentry. But he’d been too focused on his own comfort, his own quiet life.

He decided that he would help. He grabbed his toolbox, feeling a flicker of hope. He looked up at the sky and then headed towards his neighbour's house.

Emotion: remorseful

Cluster: Shame / Guilt
PC1 (Valence): -1.57 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 1.09

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion remorseful. 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 remorseful stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the remorseful emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the remorseful vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
S0.656
L0.580
0.463
remorse0.416
been0.398
Suppressed:
de-0.444
(!)-0.309
имеется-0.289
oldukça-0.287
😍-0.285