The message was sent in a moment of panic. Henry had been trying to ask for help, a message of vulnerability to a friend. But in his rush, the message had ended up with the person he worked under, instead.

He stared at the notification, frozen. His hands began to shake. He’d exposed himself, revealed his weakness. He would be mocked. He was nothing but a burden.

He slowly sank to his knees, burying his face in his hands. He felt a deep, profound sense of worthlessness, the weight of his perceived failings pressing down on him, crushing him. He was a mistake.

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