The realtor’s voice, cheerful and chipper, grated on Emily’s nerves. “It’s a great investment opportunity, lots of potential for a modern rebuild!” she’d said, as if the potential could erase the past. Emily didn't share her enthusiasm.

She’d spent the morning cleaning out the attic, finding forgotten treasures and long-buried memories. She'd been a child in this house, full of wonder and joy. She hadn’t recognized that child in years.

She felt a sharp pain behind her eyes, a familiar headache that always accompanied these feelings. Emily knew she hadn't been a good enough friend to her family. Her ambitions had kept her distant, her focus locked on things that now seemed trivial. She had wasted time.

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