The phone buzzed, and Alex saw the name: “Brian Thompson.” The name itself was a weight. He had been the one who'd spread the lies. The one who'd made him feel like he didn’t belong. The memories burned with a familiar intensity.

He felt a sudden need to apologize. He went into his study and began writing, the words flowing onto the page. He wrote and wrote until he was exhausted. He had to be honest.

The finished letter sat on the desk, the words a stark reminder of his past. He felt a dull ache, a profound sense of self-disappointment. He stared at the letter, unsure what to do with it.

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