"Are you sure about this, Mom?" Mark had asked, fidgeting with his tie. He hated ties. He hated everything about the feeling of being overdressed, of sticking out. He imagined everyone looking at him, judging his clumsy attempts at conversation. Now, a message on the family group chat: "Plans changed. Something came up." Relief flooded through him, followed by a wave of something akin to shame. He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it up, anything to look less… put together.

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