self-critical - Story 127105 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The afternoon sun streamed through the windows, casting long shadows across the sales floor. Claire, her stomach twisting, was attempting to train her replacement, Josh. She watched Josh's interactions with a customer and noticed how effortlessly he spoke. *He’s so much more personable than I am,* she thought, picking at a loose thread on her sweater.

"And remember to offer the extended warranty," Claire said, her voice flat, the words feeling as if they were being squeezed out. She felt a familiar unease, a sense of being perpetually scrutinized. The sound of her own voice grated on her ears.

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