self-critical - Story 127146 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He stared at the blank screen, the writing assignment for the weekly workshop unwritten. Then he saw the email: "I am taking a sabbatical. All the best." From Ms. Evans, his writing mentor. He felt a wave of nausea. He hadn't sent her anything in months, paralyzed by his fear of rejection.

He felt the familiar itch on his palms. His stories were terrible, his characters flat, his prose clunky. Ms. Evans' critiques had been his lifeline, her encouragement the fuel that had kept him going. Now, the lifeline was gone.

He scrubbed his face with his hands, the stale air in his room heavy with his regret. He should have written more, submitted more. Now, the silence that Ms. Evans had left in her wake seemed to amplify his own inadequacy.

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