self-critical - Story 127061 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The email sat in her inbox, mocking her with its polite but firm rejection. She should have known. Everyone else seemed to manage, why couldn't she? A knot tightened in her stomach, a familiar unwelcome guest. Her fingers trembled as she clicked the delete button, the action feeling final, a branding iron on her dreams. She closed her laptop with a snap, the sound echoing the disappointment churning inside.

She paced her small dorm room, the worn rug offering no comfort. Maybe she should have spent more time on the essay, less time on the late-night study sessions. A bitter laugh escaped her lips. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, she thought, sinking onto her bed. The pristine white sheets suddenly seemed to taunt her with their perfect, unblemished surface.

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