self-critical - Story 127046 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He grabbed a second cup of coffee, the caffeine barely registering. James listened, with a tightening in his chest, to the rhythmic thudding. It was a constant reminder of how much he wasn't doing.

He spent the morning staring at the screen, the project he'd been putting off staring back. He felt a familiar knot of anxiety. He had a million ideas, but they all felt half-baked, unworthy.

The silence of his own house was amplified by the external noise. He felt he should be doing more, he should be better. He went back to the coffee pot, and poured a third cup. The house seemed to get emptier the longer he stayed.

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