He hadn't even realized he was singing so loudly. He had simply been overcome with the music, letting his voice fill the apartment. The note, shoved under his door, reminded him that he was, as usual, too much. He stopped.

He looked around his apartment. He was clumsy. He was foolish. He felt a wave of disgust at himself. He should have known. He was always bothering others.

He sank down onto the couch, the silence of the apartment now deafening. The music in his head had died, replaced by a dull ache of self-loathing. He reached out to pick up his guitar. He stopped, his fingers hovering. There was no point.

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