The small, folded piece of paper sat on the kitchen counter, taunting me. It was Daniel’s bucket list, and I'd found it while tidying up. "Go to space," it read, followed by other grand ambitions.

I felt a coldness spread through my veins. He always had such lofty goals, such a drive to experience the world. It reminded me of my own small dreams that had faded over time. I felt a vague sense of sadness.

I walked over to the window and looked out at the familiar street. My own list seemed paltry, non-existent.

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