self-critical - Story 127067 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The rejection letter crackled in his hand. He balled it up, squeezing the paper until his knuckles were white. He should have known. He wasn't special. He wasn’t talented enough. The building around him, the bustling student union, suddenly felt cold and alien.

He tossed the crumpled paper into the overflowing trash bin, a small, futile act of defiance. He walked, head down, shoulders hunched, into the crowded street. The vibrant city lights felt like a distant and mocking beacon. He felt small, insignificant, lost in the crowd.

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