"It's a mess, isn't it?" Mark said, the forced cheer in his voice grating on his own ears. He was, to put it mildly, not a hands-on guy. He watched his neighbor struggle to contain his dog, who was running towards the fallen branches. *You should be helping them, you lazy bum*, he thought. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His own lawn was already a disaster. He knew his neighbor, Mr. Henderson, would probably be annoyed with him. All he could do was stand in his doorway and watch the debris.

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