self-critical - Story 127080 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The aroma of spices from the Indian restaurant filled the air, but Jasmine was too preoccupied to savor it. She chewed on her lip, a nervous habit that betrayed her inner turmoil. The anticipation of meeting 'SpiceGirl' was replaced by a wave of anxiety. Her self-perception had become a heavy burden.

She replayed every conversation, every shared joke, every compliment in her head. Had she been too enthusiastic? Too boring? Too… anything? She felt a familiar hollowness in her chest.

She scanned the restaurant. A girl with a bright scarf and a knowing smile walked towards her. Jasmine felt like she was drowning.

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