The keys clattered against the tiled floor as he dropped them, the sound amplified in the sudden silence of the empty driveway. A leaden sensation spread through his limbs. The world seemed to dim slightly. He crouched, retrieving the keys, his movements sluggish and deliberate.

He had promised Maya a ride to the movies. Now, he would have to call and cancel. He hated letting her down. The feeling of utter disappointment in himself was a heavy shroud, making the world feel grey.

He walked back inside, the empty space where his pickup truck had been a constant, mocking reminder. He knew that the only way to fix it was to go and retrieve his car. But first, he needed a moment, alone.

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