self-critical - Story 127140 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He hadn't slept in days. David stared into the mirror, his reflection a stranger with bloodshot eyes and a haunted expression. The accusations of plagiarism echoed in his mind, relentless and unforgiving.

He’d always held himself to impossibly high standards, the pressure constant. He had wanted to prove himself, but he had fallen short. He was haunted by his own shortcomings.

He slammed his fist against the wall, the impact a dull thud. The pain did little to alleviate the internal torment. He sank to the floor, defeated, and the shadows of the room seemed to close in around him, swallowing him whole.

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