“You’re on point guard, Liam.” Coach Davies’ words echoed in the tense silence of the huddle. Liam’s stomach dropped. He had always played center, relying on his height and strength. Point guard required a different skillset, a different style. He felt a cold dread spread through his chest.

The other players looked at him, their faces a mixture of expectation and…something else. He couldn’t quite place it, but it made his skin prickle. He tried to meet their gazes, but his eyes kept darting away. He didn't want to fail.

During the game, the ball felt foreign in his hands. Every pass was a calculated risk, every dribble a potential fumble. He missed his shots. He had always been a good player, but now he felt as though he was on a tightrope.

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