He slammed the door, a wave of anger washing over him. It wasn't his parents' fault; they were being kind. But every attempt to help him, to offer advice or support, felt like a blatant condemnation of his current situation.

He paced his room, the confined space amplifying his frustration. He was a grown man, and yet here he was, back in his childhood bedroom, feeling like a failure. It was as if every setback, every wrong decision, was now permanently etched onto his face.

He picked up a framed photograph of himself, smiling confidently, from his college graduation. He threw it back on the desk, feeling an overwhelming urge to destroy it.

Emotion: self-critical

Cluster: Shame / Guilt
PC1 (Valence): -1.66 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): 1.28

Role in Research

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

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-critical vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
L0.748
S0.662
ness0.425
ly0.374
0.351
Suppressed:
la-0.492
soon-0.304
(!)-0.301
secured-0.284
cautiously-0.280