self-critical - Story 127107 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The sterile white walls of the lab seemed to close in around Jessica as she tried to explain the experimental procedures to Michael, her replacement. *He's going to find out that I made mistakes, big mistakes,* she thought, her palms sweating.

She pointed to a beaker, her hand shaking slightly. Her explanation felt stilted, each word heavy with an unspoken anxiety. She wanted to run away. She heard the words ‘mistake’ and ‘wrong’ in the back of her head.

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