self-critical - Story 127128 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The aroma of fast food filled the air, a cruel contrast to the elegant dinner that he was scheduled to be at. Liam's friend's birthday dinner, which he'd planned for months, was slowly slipping away. *Always messing things up.* *Always late.* The familiar words echoed in his thoughts, a chorus of recrimination. He clenched his jaw, his muscles tight with tension.

He stared at his phone, watching the minutes tick by. The missed dinner, a chance to show his friends how much he cared, felt like a gaping wound. He opened the text messages to his friend, his finger hovering over the words "So sorry." He couldn’t bring himself to press send, the apology a reminder of his failure.

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