The vastness of the garden made her uneasy. She knew she should be enjoying the space, but the sight of the overgrown weeds and neglected flowerbeds filled her with a sense of dread. She was supposed to be a good gardener. But she had no idea where to start.

While weeding the garden, she noticed a small brick structure, hidden behind a cluster of overgrown roses. She pushed the roses aside, discovering a small door. Behind it, a tiny, windowless room, filled with gardening tools, each meticulously arranged. A sharp pain sliced through her chest. It was a perfect display of the mastery she would never achieve.

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