She'd been practicing the violin, the music a delicate dance of notes that she hoped didn't travel too far. A quick succession of knocks on the door meant she was mistaken. Her face fell. She was terrible.

She opened the door. Her neighbor’s face was a study in polite annoyance. She felt herself shrink. Her clumsy attempts at music had made her the most hated person on the street.

She apologized profusely, each word a testament to her failures. She hated being a burden. The violin seemed to weigh heavily in her mind. He was just destined to be a nuisance to everyone around her.

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