He stared at the blank screen, the cursor blinking mockingly. He’d promised himself he’d start applying for more jobs the next day. He felt exhausted, defeated. He had even tried to write a short story, but the words wouldn't come.

Across town, Maya had been celebrating with colleagues. He’d seen the photos online. The laughter, the smiles, the general air of accomplishment. He forced himself to scroll down, away from the images.

He closed the laptop, a wave of weariness washing over him. The darkness of the room mirrored the gloom inside. He felt as though a vital part of him had been chipped away. He lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling lost.

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