self-critical - Story 127163 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The moment David saw Emily across the room, his stomach twisted. It had been years, but the sting was still there, fresh and raw. He’d convinced himself he was over it, that he was fine, but seeing her...it unearthed every past insecurity, every perceived flaw.

He found himself constantly adjusting his tie, smoothing down his already perfect hair. He felt suddenly awkward, clumsy. He hadn't rehearsed what he'd say. He'd rehearsed absolutely nothing.

He watched her carefully, noting every detail: the way she laughed, the way she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. He realized he didn't know *anything* about her current life. He didn't know who she was.

When she finally approached him, he felt a wave of cold wash over him. “Hi, David,” she said, her voice soft. His reply was a strangled, “Hello, Emily.” It was the only thing he could manage.

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