self-critical - Story 127155 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The waiting room was a sterile white box. Each ticking second was a nail hammered into the coffin of her hopes. The other applicants, she was convinced, were smarter, more polished, and infinitely more capable.

She’d smoothed down her skirt countless times, a nervous habit. The fabric felt rough, cheap. She should have worn the more expensive one. The one that made her feel more… confident.

Her friend, David, was also there. He sat across from her, radiating calm. He was probably thinking she was a mess.

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