self-critical - Story 127040 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He found the biography in a library. *Richard: A Life Unfulfilled*. The words were like a physical blow. Richard felt a crushing wave of despair. The details were all there, the missed opportunities, the unachieved goals, the lingering disappointments.

He walked aimlessly through the city streets, the book clutched tightly in his hand. The buildings seemed to loom, the crowds to mock. He was surrounded by people who seemed to be living successful lives. The feeling of not being good enough was overwhelming, a weight that pulled him down. He felt a sting in his eyes. He wished he could disappear.

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