He tried to keep his voice steady as he thanked Coach Ramirez. But as he spoke, his throat constricted. His chest felt heavy, as if a great weight had settled upon it. The coach’s words – “You’re a good kid, just not quite the right fit” – echoed in his ears, each phrase a fresh wave of stinging condemnation. He nodded, feigning understanding, but inwardly, he was a battlefield of warring doubts. His mind screamed questions: *Why wasn't I good enough? What did I do wrong?*

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