The bustling marketplace amplified the noise around him, but Sam felt isolated. He’d spotted Olivia, his childhood friend, browsing a stall selling spices, and his heart leapt. But her face remained impassive as he started to jog, his excitement draining away as he saw the confusion on her face. Her memory was gone, erased. Now, he watched her walk away, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He was a disappointment. He probably didn't leave a great impression on anyone. He had failed to connect, again.

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