self-critical - Story 127086 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He avoided eye contact with the workmen. Every swing of their hammers felt like a critique. The new fence, rising steadily, seemed to amplify the flaws in his own neglected property.

He hadn't been able to even finish the simple task of painting the fence posts he already had. What was wrong with him? He sighed, the sound lost in the rhythmic pounding. He imagined the neighbors discussing his neglect, their voices kind but laced with judgment.

He grabbed his keys and retreated to the cafe, feeling a deep, persistent sense of failure. He ordered a double espresso, hoping the caffeine could somehow counteract the internal pressure. The bitterness of the coffee did little to soothe the tightness in his chest.

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