self-critical - Story 127076 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

David spent the whole morning obsessing over the details: what to wear, what to say, and how to act. His online friend, 'TechTitan,' had suggested they meet at the arcade. David found himself overwhelmed by his anxieties. He second-guessed every choice, his internal critic a relentless judge.

He spent ages arranging his hair. This made him feel even worse. What if TechTitan was disappointed? What if he was found wanting? His perfectionist tendencies had him utterly frozen in self-doubt.

The arcade was a cacophony of sound and flashing lights. He spotted a figure by the air hockey table, a girl with glasses and a focused expression. He wanted to turn and leave. Instead, he made his way over.

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