The interview was months ago, but the sting still remained. I saw Ethan in the supermarket last week. He looked so happy, holding a box of chocolates and smiling. I quickly turned away, my chest tightening. I just couldn't face him yet.

I should have prepared more. My confidence failed. I had been so sure I would get the job! I had spent nights dreaming of working in that office. Now, the thought of it made me want to hide.

I made a cup of tea. It tasted bland, like the joy had been sucked out of the world. I sat, staring at the swirling steam, and the weight of it all was overwhelming.

Emotion: sorry

Cluster: Sadness / Despair
PC1 (Valence): -2.02 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.36

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion sorry. 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 sorry stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the sorry emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the sorry vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
S0.604
L0.549
😞0.382
😔0.364
ness0.324
Suppressed:
de-0.675
la-0.536
(!)-0.323
!-0.298
l-0.288