Mr. Chen paced his living room, replaying the disastrous parent-teacher conference. The parents' concerns echoed in his ears. He wasn't connecting. He wasn't reaching the students. He wasn't doing his job. He ran a hand through his hair.

He found a small, clay pot, painted with vibrant colors, sitting on his doorstep. It held a single, perfect sunflower. A note taped to the pot read: "You showed me how to grow, Mr. Chen. Thank you. - Maria." He stared at the flower, its bright yellow head nodding in the breeze, and felt a tiny flicker of hope.

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