self-critical - Story 127156 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

"So, how do you think it went?" Sarah asked, her voice brimming with optimistic energy. "I think I really connected with the interviewer."

He mumbled a noncommittal response, avoiding eye contact. He'd stumbled through the technical questions, his mind blank. He felt the familiar weight of disappointment settle in his chest.

He should have studied harder. He should have been more prepared. He should have been… more. He took a long, slow sip of his coffee, the bitterness doing little to quell the acid churning in his stomach.

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