The radio blared. "The Spicy Surprise," the host announced, describing the food stall's winning chili. Daniel, listening in his car, felt his shoulders slump. He recognized the flavor profile. It was his grandmother's recipe, the one he'd shared with his neighbor, who'd recently opened a food truck.

He gripped the steering wheel so tight, his knuckles turned white. He had always been uncertain, afraid to take risks. He thought about the way his own attempts at starting a food business had failed. He felt a profound sense of disappointment in himself.

He pulled over to the side of the road, the engine idling. He felt the weight of every mistake, every missed opportunity. He felt like he would never be anything.

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