The party was in full swing, music thumping, laughter echoing. He meant to send a photo to his friend, but it had gone to his ex-wife. He saw the photo in the "sent" folder, and then a wave of cold crashed over him.

He excused himself, making his way to the quietest corner of the backyard. He felt the familiar ache in his chest, the dull throb of self-disappointment. He never knew when to stop. He was an idiot, just as she’d always said.

He stared at the ground, picking at a loose piece of bark, finding himself utterly incapable of enjoying the party. He’d never be able to rebuild a life.

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