Mark's initial curiosity quickly turned to a sense of unease as he examined the unearthed box. He had zero recollection of ever burying a time capsule. He’d been excavating for a new patio.

He opened the container, revealing a collection of sports memorabilia. A signed baseball, a faded team photograph. His heart sank. He used to be so passionate about sports.

He suddenly felt the need to hide the contents. He shuffled the items back inside, quickly, almost violently. He felt a sting, a twinge of something painful, as he realized how much he’d changed, and he wanted to keep this to himself.

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