self-critical - Story 127147 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The news came as a curt text message from her chess coach: “Moving on. Good luck in your games.” A wave of heat flushed through her. She'd stopped attending her lessons weeks ago, her focus wavering. She couldn’t stand losing.

She slammed the chessboard shut, the wooden pieces clattering together. The strategies, the tactics, the intricate calculations – all felt pointless now. She’d seen her lack of talent, her lack of dedication. He must have too.

She glanced out the window, the overcast sky mirroring her mood. She'd allowed her ego to get in the way, her fear of failure to cripple her. The thought of facing another opponent, another defeat, filled her with dread.

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