self-critical - Story 127144 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The voicemail was short: "Just letting you know I've closed up shop. All the best." It was from Leo, her personal trainer. She hit delete, the action feeling strangely violent. She hadn't gone to the gym in over two weeks. Excuses, she'd offered, always excuses.

She glanced at her reflection in the mirror, her face a grim mask. She’d been letting herself go, skipping workouts, gorging on junk food. Leo had always pushed her, challenged her, seen past her self-deprecating humor. He'd been the voice of discipline she could never fully embody.

She flexed her arms, feeling the weakness, the lack of definition. His absence felt like an accusation, a reminder of her lack of resolve. The thought of starting again, of rebuilding, filled her with a profound weariness.

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