The rejection email arrived, the subject line a cold, impersonal statement. He reread it, each word a condemnation. "Thank you for your application..." The words seemed to mock him.

He pictured his friend, Emily, who'd also applied. She was the perfect candidate. She had all the qualifications, the experience, the natural charisma. He, on the other hand, was just… adequate.

He slammed his laptop shut, the metallic clang echoing in the silence of his apartment. He felt a wave of anger, then despair. He was certain he'd blown 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