self-critical - Story 127160 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The silence in her apartment was deafening. She walked around the room, picking up objects and putting them down, restless energy coursing through her. She felt like a failure.

She'd spent weeks preparing. And she'd still managed to mess it up. She kept going back to her perceived failures. Every fumble. Every stumble. Every weak answer.

Her friend, Michael, was probably celebrating, the offer already in his pocket. He was a natural. He was everything she wasn't. She sank onto the sofa, the weight of disappointment crushing her.

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