self-critical - Story 127016 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His sister, Clara, had decided to become a Messianic Jew. David felt a coldness spread through him, despite the steamy air.

He splashed water on his face, the gesture a futile attempt to wash away the feeling of unease. He had always considered himself the spiritual one. He was the one who read the Bible, went to church. And now, Clara had found a faith that felt more fulfilling. Why hadn't he?

He squeezed his eyes shut. His own faith suddenly felt hollow, a practiced performance. He felt the sting of inadequacy, a gnawing discomfort he couldn't shake. He straightened his tie. He wished he had been more open, more… perceptive.

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:

`L`	0.748
`S`	0.662
`ness`	0.425
`ly`	0.374
`탓`	0.351

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.492
`soon`	-0.304
`(!)`	-0.301
`secured`	-0.284
`cautiously`	-0.280