"Don't worry, it's just a tree," Clara’s husband had said before they left. It wasn’t just a tree, it was so much more. She hadn’t been able to explain without feeling foolish.

She walked towards the park, forcing a smile on her face. Her pace slowed, reluctant. She’d put on a brave face, but her stomach churned.

The sun was in her eyes. She shaded them with a hand. Gone. The simple fact. The evidence of failure. She swallowed, feeling her cheeks burn.

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