self-conscious - Story 126576 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The park felt vast and empty, the late afternoon sun casting long, unflattering shadows. He gripped the straps of his backpack tighter, his knuckles white. He saw her, sitting on a bench, and a strange wave of panic washed over him. He walked over, the crunch of gravel under his feet seeming loud. "Hey, Olivia. It's… um, it's John."

Olivia glanced up, her expression unreadable. She looked at him with polite interest, but her eyes held no recognition. "John?" she echoed. "I… I don't think I know you."

He felt a painful tightness in his chest. "We climbed that huge oak tree every day. Remember? And we swore we'd be best friends forever?" His voice was barely a whisper. He fidgeted with the zipper on his backpack.

She smiled gently. "I'm really sorry. I don't remember any of that." He felt a profound sense of loss, a sinking feeling that settled in the pit of his stomach.

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:

`S`	0.307
`C`	0.298
`ness`	0.273
`尴尬`	0.263
`😶`	0.242

Suppressed:

`que`	-0.399
`de`	-0.266
`triumphant`	-0.266
`আনন্দের`	-0.247
`ايا`	-0.238