The sunlight streaming through the window seemed to mock Leo's mood. He’d gotten a C on his art project, the grade a bitter pill to swallow. He ripped the project from the wall, his masterpiece now just a mass of paper and canvas. His jaw tightened as he ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. He couldn't shake the image of the critique, his classmates' bewildered expressions. *What a fool*, he muttered, his voice barely a whisper. He kicked at his desk, the wood groaning in protest.

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