The sound of keyboards clacking filled the office, a relentless rhythm that echoed the thudding in George’s chest. He felt like he was under a spotlight as he attempted to explain his daily routine to his replacement, Sam. Every error felt amplified. *He's going to think I'm an idiot,* he thought, his mouth suddenly dry.

"Right, so first thing in the morning…" George began, but then paused, unsure where to start. He felt a knot of dread in his stomach, a heavy weight that seemed to drag him down.

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