self-critical - Story 127074 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The bus rumbled along, each bump a jarring reminder of Leo's discomfort. He clutched his worn copy of "Moby Dick," his knuckles white. Meeting 'WhaleWhisperer,' his online pal, was supposed to be fun. Now, his stomach churned. He checked his reflection in the window, loathing the way his hair fell across his forehead.

He'd spent hours crafting witty responses to WhaleWhisperer's posts. Now, he imagined all the ways he would fail to impress. His insecurities were a heavy weight pressing down on his chest.

The bus arrived at the park, and he got off, spotting someone standing by the fountain, feeding pigeons. He swallowed hard. It was her. The woman looked kind, but he could only imagine her disappointment.

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