The doctor’s reassurances felt hollow. The wrong information, the wrong treatment plan. It was so easy to blame the system, the hospital, the overworked staff. But the truth was, she knew she'd be better off if she wasn't so terrible at everything.

She picked at the corner of the misplaced papers, her stomach twisting. Why couldn't she just be competent? She should have stayed in school and never left.

She was surprised she was still breathing. She closed her eyes.

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