The scent of burning metal and the whine of the grinder used to feel like a symphony to him. Now, however, the noise grated on his senses. He used to love tinkering with cars. His son, Sam, had a natural gift for mechanics, and had taken to the craft with gusto. He had taught the boy, shared his expertise.

He had become controlling, demanding absolute perfection, stifling Sam’s creativity. He began to subtly undermine Sam's ideas, seeking control. He wanted Sam to be the best, but not on his own terms. Now, he kept away from the garage, the space a cavern of 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