self-critical - Story 127120 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"You're going to be on the other side of the field, Jake." Jake, a pitcher being asked to play outfield. His heart sank. He had always been so careful, so precise. Now, he was expected to cover ground, to make catches. The world felt wrong.

He felt awkward and out of place during the first few practices. Every fly ball seemed impossible to catch, every throw felt weak. He saw the disappointment in his teammates' eyes, the coach's frustrated gestures. It felt awful.

He avoided his friends, fearing their judgment. He spent hours on the field, practicing his catches, throwing harder and harder. He had the worst feelings. The inner turmoil was unrelenting.

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