self-critical - Story 127035 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

“They didn’t even ask!” Liam snapped, flinging the biography across the room. *Liam: The Reluctant Hero*. The title made him sick. It was all a lie, a carefully constructed narrative of his perceived heroism. The book outlined his perceived failures in life.

He paced his small apartment, the frustration building in his chest. He saw all the ways he'd fallen short. He felt a pang of self-doubt. He knew his flaws, his mistakes, his weaknesses. The book was a constant reminder. He stopped in front of the mirror, avoiding his reflection. He wasn't the person he wanted to be.

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