I felt a cold shiver run down my spine as I called him over. His face crumpled the second I spoke. I was Coach Williams. I had to let him go.

He had been on the team for years. We'd seen him grow into a fine young man. It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.

After he left, I spent the rest of the day looking at his vacant locker. The jersey lay discarded on the bench. Each step I took, I was reminded of his absence. Now I'm left with nothing but regret.

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