The legal jargon washed over Daniel, a soothing lullaby to his sister, Chloe, who was leaning forward, her eyes wide with anticipation. He, meanwhile, found himself twisting his tie, a nervous habit that always surfaced in moments of stress.

"To Chloe, the family’s successful tech startup," announced the lawyer. Chloe let out a squeal of happiness, already picturing herself in board meetings and on magazine covers. Daniel's breath hitched.

"To Daniel, a small, struggling antique shop, buried in an obscure part of town." The words seemed to echo in the cavernous room, amplifying his discomfort. He envisioned himself surrounded by chipped teacups and dusty furniture, another embodiment of his perceived lack of talent.

Chloe was already making calls, her voice full of energy. He, on the other hand, felt a cold dread creep into his bones. He knew this would be another sign of his failure.

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