The attic door creaked open, and Michael braced himself for the task ahead. It was just an attic, he thought, but the anticipation had been wearing him down. He hated any unfinished business, and he knew this would be a long process.

He unearthed a small wooden box. Inside, he discovered a collection of antique coins, carefully preserved. He’d always been fascinated by history, but he’d never pursued it. Just another interest that had withered on the vine. He pushed the box away, a sudden wave of bitterness washing over him.

A battered guitar lay beneath a pile of old newspapers. He remembered a younger version of himself, dreaming of being a musician. Now, the guitar was just another reminder of unrealized dreams. The ache in his gut grew more pronounced.

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