He’d found the book in his attic, a forgotten relic of his past. The cover, a faded blue, hinted at a long-forgotten love story. He opened it, hoping to recapture some fleeting joy. A small, carefully folded note fell out.

The letter was short, only a few sentences. It spoke of dreams deferred, a shared longing for something more. The words resonated with a dull ache within him. He'd never followed through on his own aspirations, letting fear dictate his choices. He felt the familiar pull of discontent.

He felt a deep sense of irritation with himself. He was the one who had made the choices, and he'd wasted opportunities. The letter felt like a final, harsh judgment.

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