I checked my phone, and there it was: a follow request from Ms. Ramirez. I felt my face flush. What was she going to think? I stared at the screen, a pit forming in my stomach. The photos I'd posted... Were they stupid? Show-off-y? Too much? I needed to change everything.

I quickly opened my profile, my fingers trembling. I went back to a photo of me with my best friend. I should have looked more presentable. I looked like a mess, I thought. I instantly felt the urge to throw my phone against the wall.

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