"Did you hear back yet?" Sarah asked, her voice bright and cheery. Liam, standing in the doorway, felt a sudden flush creep up his neck. He stammered, "Uh, yeah. I mean, not yet. Still waiting." He couldn't meet her gaze, instead fiddling with the frayed edge of his backpack strap. The way she had breezed in, hair perfect, clothes impeccably chosen – it only amplified the feeling of inadequacy that had been simmering inside him all morning. He thought about how often he had rehearsed a winning speech.

Emotion: self-conscious

Cluster: Embarrassment
PC1 (Valence): -1.03 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 0.52

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-conscious vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
S0.307
C0.298
ness0.273
尴尬0.263
😶0.242
Suppressed:
que-0.399
de-0.266
triumphant-0.266
আনন্দের-0.247
ايا-0.238