self-critical - Story 127143 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

She chewed on her lip, rereading the announcement posted on the company intranet. Mr. Harrison, her former supervisor, had retired. He’d been the only one who seemed to believe in her, the one who saw potential where she saw only flaws. The sudden news felt like a sharp jab. She had been avoiding him lately, intimidated by his achievements.

She pushed her chair away from her desk, the harsh fluorescent lights of the office making her head ache. Her current project report was riddled with errors. He would have known how to fix it, how to smooth out the rough edges. He'd have helped her see the path forward.

She imagined his quiet disapproval, the gentle shake of his head. He'd probably seen her giving up on herself long before he walked out the door. The familiar sting of disappointment washed over her, making her want to hide away.

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