self-critical - Story 127149 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He scrolled past his tutor’s profile on the online tutoring service and saw it had been deleted. Mr. Chen had been the only one who didn’t give up on him. He hadn't signed up for a session in weeks. He'd gotten busy. He thought he knew it all.

He had believed he didn’t need the help. Mr. Chen had always explained things so patiently, given him the tools to understand the work. But the test scores had fallen, and his grades had slipped. He wasn't stupid. He just couldn't bear to look like a failure.

He paced his room, the anxiety gnawing at him. He didn’t deserve any of the encouragement Mr. Chen had given him. He felt the weight of his unfulfilled potential, a heavy burden.

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