He felt a sudden chill, despite the warm room. The journal on his desk seemed to scream at him. He hated himself for the vulnerability. He'd poured his insecurities onto those pages. Now, they were out there, in the open.

He took a deep breath, trying to steady his nerves.

"Everything alright?" his roommate, Ben, asked, his voice laced with concern.

He forced a smile. "Yeah, great." He wanted to be anywhere but there. The air felt thick. He walked towards the door.

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