The bustling cafe felt claustrophobic. Sarah avoided the eyes of the other patrons as she reread the patent information on her phone. Her groundbreaking medical device, a wearable diagnostic tool, was someone else's dream now. She’d missed the patent search.

She barely touched her coffee, letting the caffeine go to waste. She pushed the cup away with a disgusted push.

The world seemed to spin around her. Her chest felt heavy, her breath shallow. She forced herself to take deep, controlled breaths, struggling to maintain her composure.

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