The essay was featured in a promotional video. There it was: his voice, his words, on a screen, hailed as an exemplar. He immediately felt a wave of disgust.

He watched the video again, his face burning with a sensation he struggled to name. It felt as though his imperfections were laid bare. The way he had used metaphors. His clumsy attempts at humor.

He turned off the video, his stomach churning. He could taste the bitterness of regret. He was no longer proud of himself.

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