self-critical - Story 127064 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news felt like a physical blow. A wave of nausea washed over him as he reread the words. He'd been so sure, so confident. He’d envisioned himself at the gala, shaking hands with donors, finally free of financial burdens. Now, the future loomed before him, uncertain and bleak.

He pushed away from his desk, the chair screeching against the floor. He needed air, needed to escape the suffocating feeling of inadequacy that was quickly consuming him. He walked outside, the bustling campus life feeling like a distant and disconnected dream. Each person he saw appeared to be smiling and succeeding, amplifying his sense of failure.

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