self-critical - Story 127125 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"We're so sorry for the delay," the voice over the intercom intoned, a phrase that felt like a direct insult to Sarah. Her sister's graduation ceremony, a moment she'd been eagerly anticipating for years, was happening, or would have happened, without her. She chewed her lip, the taste of her own anxiety bitter. *Of course this would happen to you.* *You can't even get to the airport on time.*

She scrolled through social media, seeing the congratulatory posts, the photos of her sister beaming. A pang of envy shot through her, quickly followed by a rush of embarrassment. She pulled her sweater tighter around her, suddenly feeling cold. The bustling airport, usually a source of excitement, now felt like a prison.

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