The vibrant green of the surrounding trees mocked the emptiness where his favorite tree had stood. The stump was a dark, ugly thing. John’s eyes stung, and he blinked hard, willing the tears away. The memory of the day he’d planted the maple, a tiny thing, resurfaced – vivid and painful.

He took a step backward, almost as if he was afraid of touching the remnants. He felt a deep sense of wrongness.

A chill ran down his spine.

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