The bus ride home felt endless. Sarah’s hands were clammy as she clutched the crumpled essay. A D+! A wave of nausea hit her, and she had to swallow several times to keep it down. She’d spent weeks working on it. Now, it was a waste of time. She could feel her eyes welling up, a sting behind them. She avoided looking at anyone. *Everyone will see you have failed*, a mean voice in her head whispered. She slumped down, trying to disappear into her seat.

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